A Story of UX, Obsession, and Elevators
This week I attended the Enterprise UX Conference in San Antonio. The event brought hundreds of UX professionals together for three wonderful days of learning and sharing. Attendees had passionate conversations about the talks, the speakers… and the hotel elevators.
User journey
The Hilton Palacio del Rio was the official hotel for the conference, so that is where I decided to stay. After checking in at the front desk, I followed the directions to the elevator hall and when I got there, I found this:
It threw me off for a second, but I was going to the 21st floor so I had it easy. I tapped 21 on the pad and walked to the center of the elevator hall. The doors of one of the four elevators opened, I walked in, verified that 21 was listed on the destination display and a few seconds later I walked out on my floor. Pretty smooth, huh?
After dropping my bags in the room I decided to go explore the surroundings, so I went back to the elevator hall on the 21st floor, tapped the lobby button and turned around to appreciate the view while I waited. One of the elevators opened behind me and there were two people inside. Instinctively, I tried to look for an indicator of whether they were going up or down but couldn’t find one so I asked. They were going to the lobby — great! I jumped in. When I got out, I saw chaos.
Over a dozen people were standing in the lobby trying to get to different floors and a member of the hotel staff was providing indications on which elevator to take. Only at that moment I realized that each elevator had a letter assigned to it, and after tapping on the floor number the touch pad would display and say a letter out loud. The only reason why I made it to my room and back to the lobby on my first ride was because I got lucky and unknowingly jumped into the right elevator. I felt stupid. I was a stupid user!
Shortly after this revelation, I started seeing this type of activity in the conference’s Slack group:
No, we are not jerks. As UX professionals, our brains are wired to scan the world around us and identify good user experience and bad user experience. Running into a new technology that disrupts a very old, solid paradigm and causes user confusion is simply irresistible to us.
Research, analysis, and conclusion
Eager to learn more about these elevators, I did some research online and found out that the Hilton uses Schindler's PORT Technology. Their corporate video does a good job explaining how the system works and actually makes it seem pretty easy:
These elevators are indeed faster and more energy-efficient than most, which are unquestionably huge benefits. So why were people so confused and frustrated at the hotel? Here is my take on that:
- The standard elevator mental model is to select a floor and automatically shift our attention to the elevator doors. My guess is that there’s a pretty high chance that the users might miss the screen and the audio that assigns them a particular elevator.
- Even if the users do see the screen and hear the instructions, they might be distracted (i.e. having a conversation, checking their phone, trying to find the room key, etc.) and forget which elevator they were assigned to, which forces them to go back to the touch pad and re-enter the floor number.
- If they happen to walk into the wrong elevator, once the doors close there is no way to select the right floor from the inside. The only buttons are ‘Door Open’, ‘Door Close’, and the standard emergency buttons.
- If the destination floor is not listed on the set of 10 default floors shown on the initial screen, the complexity increases. Users now have to navigate the screen either using the ‘Lower Floors’ button or the even less discoverable keypad button that allows them to manually type a floor number.
Like with most new paradigms, there is a learning curve.
In my opinion, Schindler's PORT Technology is a good idea for an office building where workers will most likely be repeating the process hundreds (or thousands) of times. They might struggle a bit during the first one or two days, but then they will learn and they will be set for as long as they work in that building. In a hotel, however, many guests are probably staying for only one or two nights. That might not be enough time for them to overcome the elevator learning curve, especially if they are not tech-savvy. As a result, these guests will experience confusion and frustration. In the case of the Hilton, the solution was to assign a staff member to provide assistance, because when technology gets confusing, there is nothing like a reliable fellow human to help us out.
