

Show HN: TheElevatorGame.com results - joshwprinceton
http://joshrweinstein.com/post/18578417213/theelevatorgame

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steve8918
"If we assume that everyone in US cities with >500,000 people makes two
elevator round-trips per day, the US is losing out on 270 days of worker days
per day or $13 million per year. Each elevator used wastes $160 per year. If
your elevator was installed x years ago and your contractor charges you y per
hour and takes z hours to invert the buttons, should you inver them? Return
((25-x) _160-y_ z >= 0);"

Sorry but this is absolute garbage. I hate when people take a meaninglessly
insignificant value, and then extrapolate it out to come up with a ridiculous
dollar value, to try to prove a point.

270 worker days because of elevator buttons? Imagine how much the US loses
because people sit on the toilet for 2 mins longer every day because they play
Words with Friends. I assure you that lost productivity completely outweighs
any time spent figuring out which buttons to press on an elevator.

Another error on your part is that you even said yourself that familiarity
with the button layout will improve the time. So basically, if the same person
is using the same elevator over and over again, it can't improve much further
after a few attempts. It's only the first 10 times that the person actually
might take more time, and after that it has reached the optimal level.

Sorry to be blunt, but you should abandon this project. It's not useful at
all.

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joshwprinceton
hey steve, first off - thanks for reading the whole way through and in such
detail. i completely agree that there are more important matters in the world.
the real point of the piece is at the end when i talk about the importance of
evaluating all the experiences that you encounter and how you approach the
design thereof. the dollar value may not be the most scientific of
conclusions, but just trying to give a tangible sense of what the effects are.
it's also somewhat light-hearted, in case that wasn't clear.

in terms of further pursuit of the project, didn't have any plans for the
buttons in particular except to underscore the importance of user experience
design

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camtarn
Wonder how this changes when you take basement levels, strange starting
floors, or different popular floors into account? My current building has
three basement floors, which are below the ground floor on the button panel,
my Uni building's ground floor was actually floor 2 (it was built on a hill!),
and the local shopping center has the bottom floors dedicated to parking, so
the usual pattern is reversed: 50% of the traffic goes to the top floor to
access the shops.

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huhtenberg
If you start counting microsecond savings, shouldn't you also account for the
fact that people looking for a Lobby button _in a real elevator_ (and not on a
website) would actually be looking at the bottom of the panel, because that's
where a Lobby button typically is. If the button is not there, then a person
will have a WTF moment, followed by a mental stumble, followed by a guess that
the Lobby is actually on the 2nd floor, followed by time needing to look the
panel over and so on. Even if the button is at the bottom, but of a different
shape, size or if it has a LOBBY on it, it's still a hassle, because that's
not what's expected of it. If you ever been to Vegas with its humongous
"Casino Floor" elevator buttons, you should be able to relate to this with
ease.

The whole thing is basically an <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow>
example. It is silly.

~~~
joshwprinceton
this is accounted for towards the end of the blog by way of insisting on the
importance a real-world use case experiment and determining how people adjust
to the configurations over time

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losvedir
Having two separate lobby buttons which take you to the same floor is
_extraordinarily_ confusing to me. I had to make sure I wasn't
misunderstanding something because it seems like an obviously bad idea. But
no, that's the plan:

"Adding a big lobby button at the top will make it faster to identify and hit
the lobby button, while persisting the existing lobby button on the bottom."

The clear solution is to make the existing lobby button twice as wide, right?
I'd have been very interested to see the results of a layout like that.

That said, elevator buttons are in need of redesign. I have never in my life
hit the "hold open" or "close now" buttons because something about the
triangles confuses me about which is which, in the short time I have during
which they'd take effect.

~~~
joshwprinceton
It sounded good in my head...I guess the results showed that having two lobby
buttons was not the right way to go! Glad to hear you support the redesign :D

~~~
losvedir
Well good for you for trying an experiment about it.

You might like the book _The Design of Everyday Things_ which is about issues
like confusing elevator buttons.

I just flipped through my copy, actually, because I wanted to quote a passage
at you, but I couldn't find it so I guess I was wrong: I had thought one
principle of good design was a one-to-one mapping of interface features to
functionality. Two buttons doing the same thing would break this concept, but
maybe it's not a principle after all.

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slewis
Hey thanks for the shout out! I was wondering when you were going to post
results.

There are some really cool visualizations in the linked opani page:
[http://opani.com/ryan/elevator-
analysis/results/#key=elevato...](http://opani.com/ryan/elevator-
analysis/results/#key=elevator)

I think the most relevant part of this for web folks is the gamification
aspect (obviously its what I was interested in in your previous post). I'd
love to see a version of this where you show 50% of users "play 20 times to
get an easter egg" and give the other 50% no incentive. How much does it
actually increase engagement?

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joshwprinceton
haha of course, thanks for the active commenting on the last thread! i think
that's a good example, but it seems pretty clear that your hypothesis was
correct :D

~~~
slewis
Well its an obvious insight. But the actual increase in time spent on page is
what would be interesting.

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joshwprinceton
We have the session lengths in terms of time as well -- all the data is on git

~~~
slewis
But you had the gamification stuff in place for everyone right? So there'd be
no control group.

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rokhayakebe
Elevators should have touchscreen panels allowing an easy change of interface.

~~~
camtarn
Physical buttons with braille are probably a bit easier for blind users. You
could have the elevator read out the label of each button on the screen as it
was dragged over, or use voice recognition. However, since a decent number of
lifts have braille labels, a blind user would expect to be able to run a hand
over the buttons, guess roughly where there button should be, and read the
braille label - and once they'd found that button, they could then remember
its physical position (two buttons from the left, three from the top) for
future use.

Physical buttons also require very little power when not in use, and their
cost scales relatively well regardless of number of buttons - whereas a
touchscreen panel three or four feet high for a very tall building would be
pretty pricey. Touchscreens do have the advantage of no moving parts, so
they're waterproof and have no internal wear and tear over time (assuming a
sufficiently tough protective screen), but monitor illumination dims then
breaks fairly quickly, and any protective plastic/glass shield over the
touchscreen could get pretty scratched up.

~~~
onecreativenerd
I believe a haptic tablet experiment is in order...

