And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that.
Because more people or larger objects use the double door. In both cases, it has nothing to do with you as user using the door, so you're wasting brain cycles thinking about it. It's a door. Walk through it.
it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference.
No it doesn't. Size may imply significance difference (which is the "why" you're looking for) but I can't think of many cases where it implies functionality difference. A double door serves the same purpose as a single one.
Trying to figure out if there is significance in the door sizes is not a conscious thing - and it is important to do this sort of thing in the background, unless you want to be to be the one who trips the fire alarm.
But fire doors are the size of normal doors. They just tend to have giant warning signs on them, are sometimes painted red and tend to have "push bars" instead of handles.
Door size has very little to do with fire door "affordance".
...and in your example, you said a normal sized door next to double-doors. Yes, there are other signals indicating emergency exits. But I was assuming, from your example, that the only piece of information we had was the door size. My point was that most people would then look for other signals to indicate what was going on - such as giant warning signs and push-bars.
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And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that.
Because more people or larger objects use the double door. In both cases, it has nothing to do with you as user using the door, so you're wasting brain cycles thinking about it. It's a door. Walk through it.
it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference.
No it doesn't. Size may imply significance difference (which is the "why" you're looking for) but I can't think of many cases where it implies functionality difference. A double door serves the same purpose as a single one.
Trying to figure out if there is significance in the door sizes is not a conscious thing - and it is important to do this sort of thing in the background, unless you want to be to be the one who trips the fire alarm.
But fire doors are the size of normal doors. They just tend to have giant warning signs on them, are sometimes painted red and tend to have "push bars" instead of handles.
Door size has very little to do with fire door "affordance".
...and in your example, you said a normal sized door next to double-doors. Yes, there are other signals indicating emergency exits. But I was assuming, from your example, that the only piece of information we had was the door size. My point was that most people would then look for other signals to indicate what was going on - such as giant warning signs and push-bars.