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I live in a building that has this. As a resident - it works. Whoever made this building made a whole lot of mistakes though: - They put this into a building

I live in a building that has this. As a resident - it works. Whoever made this building made a whole lot of mistakes though: - They put this into a building with public spaces (e.g. a doctor's office). - When standing in front of the elevators, nowhere does it say which office is on which floor (it says so in the lobby which you walked by to get to the elevators) - The screens where riders have to select floors automatically turn off after not being used for a few minutes. At that point, to people who have never used them before, they do not look like they have anything to do with the elevators at all. - When these screens do turn on, they list the floors in reverse order (i.e. highest first). That makes sense because the people on the highest floors are the most likely to use the elevators, right? Well, all the offices are on floors 1 through 4. They're on page two of the screen. The button for "next page" is not labelled as such. You have to know it's there. - The screens are resistive touch screens and not well calibrated. The buttons to select a floor are approximately the same height as the tip of your index finger. A first time user won't hit the correct floor the first time, guaranteed. - At the point where you are standing in front of the elevators, you are so deep into the building that you have 0 cell reception. I have randomly encountered food delivery people be stranded there because they could not call their customers to figure out how to use the elevator. Every single week I have to rescue a poor 80 year old person who needs to go to the doctor and is horribly lost and confused, and it just breaks my heart how the building's owner (which I've contacted about this to no avail) chose "oh the salesperson said this was more efficient and trendy" and now a large percentage of users are so much worse off for that choice.

ehvatum 4y ago
I wonder if there is any improving that system without replacing it.
- xmodem 4y ago
  Most of the problem described here is the input mechanism. The building I work in has "destination dispatch" too but instead of a touchscreen, it has a large numeric keypad that you type your floor number on, with physical buttons that look like normal elevator buttons. We do also have some floors that are open to the public and i've only seen people confused by it a couple of times in several years of working here.
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  There are some easy fixes to the things I described - like adding a list of offices and floor numbers above the touchpads, or adding a phone signal boosting indoors antenna. Apart from that, the first thing I wondered when I moved in was "oh, as a resident, does that mean I just get a keyfob I can wave at this screen that knows I live on the X-th floor?". That's also feasible, to the degree that the Wikipedia article linked above refers to this. The problem with all these fixes is of course that they all cost more than $0. And neither the company owning this building nor any landlord company involved in its operation is even based in the same ZIP code as the building. So why would they care?
  - 8organicbits 4y ago
    > So why would [the landlord] care? A complaint from one of many residents may be futile, but a complaint from the retail tenant with the largest space would carry more weight. Surely showing that this elevator decreases the value of their building would be something they'd care about, if delivered correctly.
ziml77 4y ago
This is such a bad use for touch screens. I worked in a building that installed them on the elevators and it was such a terrible experience. They were properly calibrated capacitive touch screens, but it was still very likely that you wouldn't get the selection you wanted. Humans can't actually aim their fingers that accurately.

ehvatum 4y ago

I wonder if there is any improving that system without replacing it.

xmodem 4y ago
Most of the problem described here is the input mechanism. The building I work in has "destination dispatch" too but instead of a touchscreen, it has a large numeric keypad that you type your floor number on, with physical buttons that look like normal elevator buttons. We do also have some floors that are open to the public and i've only seen people confused by it a couple of times in several years of working here.
ThePadawan 4y ago
There are some easy fixes to the things I described - like adding a list of offices and floor numbers above the touchpads, or adding a phone signal boosting indoors antenna. Apart from that, the first thing I wondered when I moved in was "oh, as a resident, does that mean I just get a keyfob I can wave at this screen that knows I live on the X-th floor?". That's also feasible, to the degree that the Wikipedia article linked above refers to this. The problem with all these fixes is of course that they all cost more than $0. And neither the company owning this building nor any landlord company involved in its operation is even based in the same ZIP code as the building. So why would they care?
- 8organicbits 4y ago
  > So why would [the landlord] care? A complaint from one of many residents may be futile, but a complaint from the retail tenant with the largest space would carry more weight. Surely showing that this elevator decreases the value of their building would be something they'd care about, if delivered correctly.

ziml77 4y ago

This is such a bad use for touch screens. I worked in a building that installed them on the elevators and it was such a terrible experience. They were properly calibrated capacitive touch screens, but it was still very likely that you wouldn't get the selection you wanted. Humans can't actually aim their fingers that accurately.