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Might be a bit off-topic… But: The one big question I have with elevator UX is this: why isn’t it possible to deselect a choice? So pressed 10th floor but want
by baxtr 4y ago
Might be a bit off-topic…
But: The one big question I have with elevator UX is this: why isn’t it possible to deselect a choice? So pressed 10th floor but wanted 11th. There is no way to press button 10 and then button 11 to correct that mistake.
Will I ever solve this mystery?
- rootusrootus 4y agoI imagine that's by design. Otherwise you could unselect other people's choices.
- baxtr 4y agoYes of course it’s by design. I just wonder why.
- mulmen 4y agoBecause you could deselect other peoples choices.
- ehvatum 4y agoHow do I go about deselecting other people's choices, if that's my specific goal? I can get whatever I want in Jira, but nothing in elevators. It's fucked.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- eddd-ddde 4y agoThis isn't an argument, as you can also select other people's non-choices.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 4y agoThat doesn't prevent people from getting to their destination.
- rootusrootus 4y agoThere's some incentive not to do that, however, because in many cases it will inconvenience you just as much as everyone else. But if you could just deselect all the floors between the current one and your destination, there's a pretty strong incentive there. Until someone punches you out, of course, because it'd be hard to hide and you're in a confined space with them...
- halfnormalform 4y agoElevators sometimes have an anti-mischief feature where they will deselect every floor if all the floors are selected in a brief period of time. The cab will slow to a stop if no new buttons are pressed. It’s kind of eerie, actually.
- mulmen 4y agoNeat! How do you know this?
- halfnormalform 4y agoThe elevators at my office were upgraded a few years ago and one of the elevator techs happened to mention it to me. I tried it out while alone, for obvious reasons.
- mulmen 4y agoCool. I was hoping for something other than "I exhaustively test all new elevators".
- 4y ago
- jaywalk 4y agoNot worth complicating the UX to address such a minor issue.
- allenu 4y agoThis is it exactly. It opens up the door to even more complexity in the design... Now that you can unselect floors, if the elevator is on its way to the 5th floor and you unselect it, should it skip that floor mid-movement? If there's only one floor selected, we'll probably want to disallow unselecting it while the elevator is moving, but what if you just hopped on and it hasn't moved yet? This would probably make for an interesting interview question.
- baxtr 4y agoMinor to you... Introducing a great experience is the job of good UX. Not simply limiting options and saying 'done'. I am sure there are better options to handle this. Seems like no-one has put the effort into it (yet).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jaywalk 4y agoUnnecessarily stopping at a floor for a few seconds is minor to literally everyone riding in a public elevator. But yeah, I'm sure that at all of the various elevator companies, over all of the years that elevators have had electronic controls, nobody has bothered to put any thought into this.
- bobthepanda 4y agoLimiting options is exactly the point. Elevators are supposed to be easy to use for the entire population, including the very young, the very old, those with disabilities, those not able to read or write the dominant language, etc. In these cases, it is simply the best UX to keep everything really simple.
- samatman 4y agoMaybe ask a woman?
- dejj 4y agoIn Marc-Uwe Kling's "Qualityland", reversing elevators, turning around subway cars, and flicking traffic lights is a level-skill obtained by accumulating social credit points. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Visit-Tomorrow-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/140919115X https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Visit-Tomorrow-Marc-Uwe-K...
- pflenker 4y agoBecause in a busy environment (where consistently more than one person uses the elevator) the scenario of making a wrong decision and having the wish to correct it occurs far less than the scenario where someone does not pay attention to which floors have been selected already and deselects your destination. At the worst case this means that you both miss your stop because you both did not notice.
- baxtr 4y agoYes, some elevator environments are busy. But many aren't.
- alephxyz 4y agoMight also get confusing if the LED indicating the button's been pressed stops working
- Swenrekcah 4y agoThis comment right here is an example of thinking like a good designer. No amount of sleek surfaces and cool lighting can beat this.
- h4waii 4y agoLeave the button recessed after it's been selected, even if the LED fails (how often does this actually happen?) it's still a visual and tactile indicator. To deselect the floor, simply press in again.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThose buttons are expensive and fail relatively quickly. It's a good idea, though.
- Fatnino 4y agoRemove the buttons entirely and replace with a QRcode/NFC thing where each rider can vote/unvote where he personally wants to go. This can also work outside before the elevator arrives so a routing system can decide to bundle up a bunch of people going to the same floor in one express elevator. Haven't thought out how the ux would look to keep the wrong people out of that one elevator.
- layer8 4y agoThere are two cases where deselecting a floor would complicate the logic: 1. When the currently targeted floor is deselected and the remaining selected floors are all in the other direction: Then the elevator would have to either reverse course without stopping — a situation which otherwise doesn’t occur and would be unexpected and possibly dangerous for the passengers — or stop on a non-selected floor before changing direction, which would be confusing as well. 2. The deselected floor was the only selected floor: The elevator would then have to choose a floor to stop on by itself — e.g. the next one it can safely stop on — which is also a situation that doesn’t otherwise occur. In addition, deselecting the only selected floor doesn’t seem to be a practical use case. So instead of having to define, implement and test a behavior for those odd situations, it’s safer and less costly to just disallow deselection.
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- xmodem 4y agoRather than testing these scenarios, couldn't one simply just(tm) not allow deselection in these scenarios?
- layer8 4y agoThen you’d have to test that. And it would still be confusing to users that deselecting only sometimes works.
- bobthepanda 4y agoRight. HN is not representative of the average person, or even a standard cross section of society. A elevator has to be legible to an 8 year old child, an 80 year old retiree, someone who is blind, a person who is deaf, etc. When designing for such a broad audience, KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
- deathanatos 4y agoI didn't think elevators permitted scenario 1 to occur at all; I thought they refused to allow selecting floors not in the direction of travel. (I don't usually board elevators traveling in the wrong direction, ofc., so, I'm not that sure.)
- hahnchen 4y agoIf I were to guess, people enter the elevator and subconsciously just press which floor they want to go to. If you allow deselecting, someone will inadvertently deselect where they want to go to if that button is already selected.
- butterNaN 4y agoI have been to a few elevators in India where you can deselect a choice like you described. However they are not rare.
- thefifthsetpin 4y agoSome elevators are clever enough to detect kids messing with them. If you select enough floors, they'll just deselect everything soon, including your errant selection. Admittedly, that's not very helpful unless you somehow knew that the elevator you were in had been configured in such a way.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoElevators in Japan often support this; usually either a double-tap or press-and-hold the button to deselect.
- asmosoinio 4y agoIn the Philippines (tested in Manila) high rises this seemed to be a common feature: Double clicking a selected floor would deselect.
- susam 4y ago> But: The one big question I have with elevator UX is this: why isn’t it possible to deselect a choice? So pressed 10th floor but wanted 11th. There is no way to press button 10 and then button 11 to correct that mistake. In many elevators, one can double-press a button to deselect it.
- vl 4y agoNow I have a lot of testing in front of me.
- nhumrich 4y agoI agree. Should be a "hold the button for 5 seconds to deselect"
- andreareina 4y agoSome elevators have this! The one I encountered was, press the button until it starts flashing, release and press again to deselect the floor.
- robocat 4y agoI suspect you are thinking like a lawful-good individual engineer. You are solving a niggle, without considering the human and engineering compromises you would discover if you worked in the industry. You are perhaps trying to optimise for a one-person elevator trip, rather than thinking of what is the optimum for a repeated game with many concurrent trip players that includes both cooperator players and defector players. An elevator is a common good to its users. If people could cancel a destination, then there is less incentive for people to have to prethink their destination before getting on the elevator. Leading to more likely to waste concurrent elevator users’ time in the long run? If you could cancel a destination, defector players could cancel your destination to speed up their trip (with resulting policing and status meta-games etcetera). Elevators mostly have the lowest-common-denominator for a UI. Where is the incentive for elevator purchasers (building procurement or facilities) to demand an improved UI? Would a manufacturer get any profit by providing an improved UI? Would such a UI be accessible to the blind? Discoverable? Usable? Cleanable? Predictable (e.g. elevator arriving indicators on destination floors)? Safety? Complexity? There are a huge number of factors to building anything complicated. Also see https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ and https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ and all of the elevator wiki starting here https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_service_mode_(EFS) https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_service_mode_(EFS) Disclaimer: I’m not an elevator engineer. I feel your pain: I want a government department of niggles which catalogues minor complaints and gets them fixed. Although I admit I am pessimistic enough to think it would only end up increasing the total number of niggles due to second-order effects.
- googlerx 4y agoEvery single elevator in Korea allows you to deselect a floor by simply pushing the button again. You'd be surprised how often it comes in handy and have never had an issue with anyone deselecting someone else's floor.
- SgtBastard 4y agoIn smaller installations (e.g. private homes) this is the functionality provided by some lifts: push once to select, double push to de-select a floor. In larger/public settings, offering this would be counterproductive, for the reasons listed by sibling comments.
- DivineBicycle 4y agoIt seems like every lift I've been in in China ( been here for 8 years) has this functionality where if you press the same button in rapid succession about 5 to 15 times, it will depress.
- googlerx 4y agoEvery elevator in Korea works this way. Pressing once selects, pressing again deselects.
- robocat 4y agoPerhaps you could answer the two questions here, preferably relating to a named elevator model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005810 And maybe answer my question too: how do blind people know if they are selecting or deselecting? Watching foreign button-mashers must be amusing!
- jhugo 4y agoThe elevators in my building do support this. People get confused all the time by accidentally deselecting the floor because they didn't notice it was already lit up. Also, the "G" light is broken in one of the elevators, which causes even more confusion (until you realise that it's not broken on the second, lower set of buttons for people in wheelchairs).