Recently I came across what will likely become the new elevator experience. I was downtown for some training and had pulled into an underground car park for the day. After I parked my car, I went to the elevator and was faced with a keypad. There was a G on it, so I pushed it, assuming that it was for Ground floor. Before I got into the elevator car, I took note of the fact that the marker on the elevator door frame showed 2B.
Once I got into the elevator, I noticed that there was very little in terms of an interface. There were buttons for opening and closing the doors, stopping the elevator, and sounding the alarm in case of problems. Other than that, there was a display that showed which floors the elevators would be stopping in, and voice commands reiterating the next floor you were going to, and the floor you had arrived at.
At the end of the day, I went to the ground floor, and was faced with the same keypad. I recalled having parked in level 2B, so I pushed 2B. The small screen displayed 2 (second floor) and an arrow with a letter telling me which elevator would serve me. I tried this again, thinking it was my error, and had the same result. I then tried pushing B for basement, thinking I could select the basement level after my initial choice of B; no dice, it just showed a B. It was on the fourth try when I pushed B2 that the keypad informed me I would be going the proper floor. Now, remember, the door frame marker when I entered the elevator car had said 2B, and in the end, I had to push B2.
The moral of the story is that mislabeling the options will cause confusion for your users, especially if you are not offering an opportunity to change your options once you are “in transit” between choosing an option, and actually getting there. If we choose to simplify interfaces, we need to make sure we think it all the way through, to avoid confusion, or worse, introducing inefficiencies into whichever system we are designing.
N.B. If you like this post, you may also like this other one on thinking things all the way through.
