Show HN: TheElevatorGame.com results

"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-yz >= 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.

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...

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?

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.

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