Getting Lost in Buildings

Donald Norman wrote about designers who can't figure out why users can't use the products they've designed. Boing Boing reports on a study by psychologists on why users get lost in award-winning buildings:

"Architects, on the other hand, may be among the class of people with very strong spatial skills, because their craft requires numerous spatial transformations, such as needing to envision 3D space from 2D depictions. One unanticipated consequence of such abilities is that they may not be very good at taking the perspective of a user with poorer spatial skills, and therefore may not be able to fully anticipate where users may have navigational difficulties within their buildings."