Elevators are interesting.
Every morning I walk into the foyer at work and join the huddle of people waiting for an elevator to take me up to the 6th floor and I usually end up thinking about how elevators work, how they’re programmed, the coordination (or lack of) between the group of elevators, the controls … and also the social etiquette and awkwardness of sharing an elevator with other people you don’t know (made worse by the fact our elevators have mirror walls).
There are many interesting observations to be made studying elevators – maybe I’ll explore that more in other blog posts, but the one aspect of elevator design I wanted to talk about in this post is the programming that closes the door and keeps the elevator going to maximise the transport of people between floors.
I was heading out for coffee with my co-worker Jono the other day; got in the elevator and he realised he’d forgotten to get something from his desk so he ran back to get it. I held the elevator for him – and this is the interesting part, because the elevator’s behaviour was almost human-like in this regard:
Firstly the doors stayed open for about 5 seconds then began to close, so I pressed the open door button and re-opened the doors. The doors stayed open for about 3 seconds then began to close, so I pressed the open door button again and the doors re-opened.
Then only one second delay and the doors started closing again. The open door button did nothing. I stuck my hand in the doorway to activate the obstruction sensor and the door opened again. Almost angrily. I kid you not – each time the doors opened or started closing I swear it was more aggressive.
Then the doors started closing again, so I physically stood in the doorway. The elevator wasn’t about to shut the door on me and injure me … but after a few seconds it started beeping loudly, making it known to me that it was angry at me preventing it doing its job.
I don’t really want to personify a dumb elevator that’s probably running on an 8086 chip but it’s uncanny how it seemingly expressed emotional responses.
Anyway, the real lesson I wanted to bring here was the idea of incrementally “loud” feedback, the idea that feedback to a user can start off as subtle and unobtrusive but if it’s important that the information be received then it can increase in size, colour, volume etc until the user notices and takes action.
Like my alarm clock. It starts off ringing faintly and increases in volume until I wake up and turn it off. That way it’s only ever as loud as it needs to be to wake me up.
It’s a concept that won’t work for everything – in fact there are only a few instances where I believe this technique would be appropriate, but done well it can mean that feedback actually achieves the objective of informing the user and sensitive to the context of the user’s current mental state, concentration and workload without risking either being too subtle or too loud and annoying.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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The lesson I took home from this is the elevator, like people, have a decreasing level of tolerance to prodding and/or an attention span that diminishes rapidly by the second :)
Thankfully, elevators are more forgiving than people and don’t hold grudges! Do that to someone and they’ll slam the doors close before you get there next time. Lol.
Great observations, Nat, and I think one that can guide us in the development of alerting systems into the apps we design.
I’ve done something similar in a manual fashion by fine-tuning my Growl notifications. The ones I only need to be aware of peripherally use a subtle display style and have sticky turned off while the ones likely to require my attention are the opposite.
On an unrelated note: can we please call a lift a lift and not americanise (or americanize, as it were) our language further?
Another interesting observation about elevators is the use of mirrors. Why so many? They give people something to do while they are waiting and so reduce the appearance of the delay and any agitation caused thereof.
I think it’s to make the elevator feel bigger so people don’t feel claustrophobic. But as with so many design decisions, it’s not that simple; adding mirrors has introduced other issues – such as the social awkwardness of not being able to avoid eye contact due to all the mirrors.
I like this idea, it’s hard to set an alerting system at the right “loudness” especially if that setting has to work for everyone.
By increasing incrementally you can sort of segment people a little while annoying the fewest possible.