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C
Photos
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Design Issues
I was on the top floor of Holden when I came up to this elevator, and the first thing you notice is that there’s two buttons on the outside. Typically these are for going up or down based on your current floor, but I was already on the top floor, so the top button is irrelevant.
The floor buttons on the inside panel were clearly labeled and in correct vertical order, but it went 3->2->1->V->G. What do V and G stand for? There’s only four floors in Holden and this ordering gives the impression there’s another floor below the basement.
There appears to be two buttons to close the doors and no button to open them. You’d have to press them to find out which button actually opens the doors, if one does at all.
Some of the buttons weren’t even functional. There was a small sign over them saying not to touch them, showing that this panel is unreliable.
B
Uses
- Going Up and Down Floors
- Helping people with disablities reach multi-story buildings
- Especially useful when it’s more than 3 or 4 flights
- Also useful when you have a large group of people
- Also useful for moving heavy objects
- Call for an Emergency if you don’t have a phone nearby
Interacting
- Request an Elevator from your floor to go up or down
- Wait for it to arrive
- Get in by yourself or with other people
- Select your desired floor
- Wait for it to reach your desired floor
Discoverability
- Clearly labeled buttons corresponding to each floor
- Representing the floor buttons in an intuitive vertical pattern
- Using the same design that people are familiar with
Feedback
- Visually, when buttons light up after pressing them
- Auditorily, after arriving at a floor it will announce the floor
- Tactilely, when pressing in a button you can feel it click
Common Mistakes
- Pressing V for the basement because it’s one below 1, when I really needed to press G
- Closing the doors on someone when you meant to open them
Sketch
I wanted to design something intuitive and unique and represent exactly what the elevator is doing and intends to do. So I have two sides in my sketch, a side for the doors, and a side for the floors. The doors are interactive and tapping them will open or close the doors, and holding them will keep open closing doors. This resolves the issue of not knowing which button to press to open or close doors as the symbols take a little longer than a glance to interpret in my opinion.
I also wanted to design in a way that would be easily implementable no matter how many floors the elevator is reponsible for. So the right side controls the floors, and it works very similarly to apple’s scrolling dropdown menu. You can have as many floors as you’d like and it would still work just as well. For buildings with 3 or less floors it wouldn’t need to scroll at all.
