Scenario
Ella Vader runs into the Prudential Center at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, March 14 to meet with a big investor on the 45th floor. She enters the lobby, full of people trying to get to work, and looks for an elevator. Vader normally takes the stairs to the 45th floor since she’s afraid of elevators, but she’s really running late.
She spots the elevator from across the room and dashes through the crowd. When she gets there, she stops in front of a screen near the closest elevator. Vader must indicate that she wants to go up to the 45th floor and find the elevator that will stop on that floor. The screen tells her which elevator will take her to her destination, and Vader locates that elevator.
Once she gets in the elevator, panic sets in, and she collapses and misses his floor. She wakes up on the 80th floor and must figure out how to get back down to her floor. Vader crawls out of the elevator, finds another elevator display and indicates that she wants to go to the 45th floor. She repeats what she did on the ground floor, except this time she doesn’t faint. Vader successfully makes it to her meeting and gets funded.
Designs
We created three different preliminary designs for our NLC elevator user interface. Our designs all had three separate parts — an interface for the elevator lobby for users to input their desired floor, an interface inside of the elevator to indicate information about their ride, and also an interface on top of each elevator to indicate information about each elevator in the lobby.
Display Location |
Design 1 |
Design 2 |
Design 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
Outside the elevator in the lobby |
-Touchscreen display |
-Use feature where users can draw out the floor they want to stop |
-Use physical buttons/keypad to enter desired elevator floor |
Inside each elevator |
-Emergency Stop Button |
-Emergency Stop Button |
-Emergency Stop Button |
Next to each elevator |
-Show all floors in building |
-Vertical display next to each elevator (starts from >2.5 feet off the ground) |
-Uses long horizontal display that lists destination floors |