Not A Blog™

This is driving me bonkers. I can’t even think straight, it makes me so angry, so allow me to indulge in a bit of steam off-blowing, inconsequential as it may seem to the rest of the world. I’m unable to think about anything else at the moment.

A few months ago, the company I work for moved to a new building. We went from being all on the ground floor to occupying parts of the second and third floor. The new building, complying as it must with handicap accessibility laws, has an elevator. The elevator moves up and down, and the doors open and close. Pretty standard, right?

Being exceptionally lazy, I’ve been using the elevator almost on a daily basis. Before I explain the problem I’ve been having with this, I first have to describe the elevator. Because some floors have different office spaces in the front and rear of the building, the elevator has a front and a back door. Access is controlled with a keycard for the floors (and directions) where the elevator opens directly into a private space. Since there are two doors, there are two sets of buttons to control the opening and closing of said doors, and some floors have two buttons, to select either the front or rear of the floor.

A visual aid:



The number buttons (not shown) are in a strange configuration too, but I can’t really complain about this. I don’t know what process went into picking a certain type of panel layout for a particular elevator. I suspect this panel is designed for a much taller building, but is used in this elevator because of the necessity of having two buttons for some of the floors. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that this panel was the best fit among the choices available.

But that’s no excuse for the way the door-open and -close buttons are set up. I can’t even comprehend why it was done this way. Look, there is a distinct mapping between the positions of the buttons on the wall and the brain’s perception of local space. This is even reinforced by the fact that the door isn’t a split door type where half the door goes into its respective side, but a full sliding door where the entire door moves in one direction. There are four buttons and four possible door positions.

SO WHY DON’T THE DAMN BUTTONS ALIGN WITH THE DOOR POSITIONS!?



The buttons should be in the place where you want the door to go! Front Door Open should be the button in the upper right because it’s the position relative to your body where you want the door to be: in the wall and therefore open.

Every single time I try to use a button, I have to stop and think about which button is where and which one I need to push because none of them are in the right place. The symbols they use to indicate doors opening and closing are no help, either, because they’re symbols for a split door elevator (showing two doors coming together or moving apart), but our elevator only has a SINGLE door on each side—so that requires extra brainpower, too! The direction the door might move based on any particular button’s icon is COMPLETELY AMBIGUOUS. GAH!

By the time I figure out what button to push, the doors have already started to close, so it doesn’t matter any more. At first I thought this might be the point: you don’t want the passengers pounding on the buttons just to make the door close 0.8 seconds faster. The problem is if there’s an emergency (not a fire; like a medical emergency), or even if you’re just trying to be polite and hold the door for someone, then the panel impedes your actions. Especially in an emergency, you don’t want to have to take the time to figure out which button to push to hold the door. But what’s especially frustrating is that by just rearranging a few buttons, the panel would be completely intuitive requiring no brainpower at all!

Why is the panel all wrong like this? More importantly, why is it that myself—a random 24 year old guy—understands this better than the person whose job is to install the damn elevator!? Come on, it’s called competence! This is such a basic, obvious piece of usability that is so simple to do correctly, that the fact it’s not right is utterly baffling and infuriating to me. It’s like building a car where turning the steering wheel right makes it stop and putting it in reverse makes it go left. The functionality of the panel is set up in two dimensions, but it doesn’t bother to take advantage of this configuration. In fact, it does worse than just not take advantage of it: it actually makes it harder to use, because you’re trying to override your instincts!

What in the world is wrong with our culture that this sort of nonsense still happens? Can’t we figure this out, people!? For crying out loud, no wonder we end up with design disaster areas like Windows Vista. We can’t even manage to intuitively arrange four—FOUR—buttons on an elevator control panel. And I’m not even complaining about the rest of the panel!

On the plus side, it did cure my laziness. Since I get so incredibly angry every time I use the elevator, now I take the stairs.

-Ted

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