Show HN: Elevators

> Ideally a new elevator installation would have a trial period where they record usage

There's a tricky problem here: as a user, the first thing you do upon discovering a new elevator, especially if you expect to be using it regularly, is to observe how it behaves and adjust your own expectations/behavior to it.

Elevators are, in a way, a heap of social and psychological problems stuffed into a box that moves up and down a lot. The article briefly acknowledges it, but like ~all such articles I read over the years, it's primarily interested in wait time and focuses on which quantile to minimize and how. But I'd love to know if and how the soft, squishy thing is being accounted for.

The core problem: elevators are frustrating for many reasons, and that frustration often manifests as hidden blame and hate towards other fellow passengers. Like, IDK, I'm sitting there with a stroller and a kid on floor -1, trying to get to the train platform at floor 0, but the elevator isn't coming because it's going back and forth between 0 and 2 and 3, as people who came by cars shuttle their luggage to and from the parking lot. As a city dweller and non-car person, I can feel my hatred towards cars and drivers bubbling up right there.

I imagine the same is felt by them if I manage to snatch the lift and go from 0 to -1, when they'd really love to already be on +2.

There's many other cases. Mall problems are different than train station problem, different than tall residential building problems, different than office building problems. Destination Dispatch is its own special thing, with its own special psychological twists. But two things I observed in general are:

- If there is a control element available, you will blame people for using it (even internally). Like, "I'd be there a minute ago if not for this damn XYZ who just had to press the button at exactly this time, and they weren't even going in this direction!"

- If there is an indicator element available, people will optimize around whatever it shows.

Like, someone gets at floor N, sees most of the buttons between there and their destination M lit up, immediately presses N+1 to get off there and call another elevator. But if the buttons are visible enough from outside the lift, they may just not get in in the first place, saving themselves and the others time and trouble, etc.

The more I think about it, the more I see that placement of buttons and indicators in the lift is in itself an UX engineering problem with unusually high impact of every decision on well-being of the users.

EDIT: Also ironically, and in line with my feeling that Star Trek got more things right than people give it credit for, a lot of elevator problems - both scheduling and social/psychological ones - would be solved if elevators just moved faster, like 2-4x faster than now, and also in some cases, also moved sideways. I.e. turbolifts.

(That, and if it didn't immediately led to the building owners putting less of them. So put another way: frustrating lifts is the sign of building owners/designers cheapening out.)

They're not great for accessibility, either.

> (...) and a lot of very good things from a sustainability and general optimisation perspective. The flip side is it also has the potential to be an absolute dystopian privacy nightmare.

Privacy is an illusion for most people, and in office spaces, it's also a red herring. Wifi trilateration doesn't make things worse when you have a CCTV camera on every corner, badge reader at every other door, and presence sensing in conference rooms. Dystopia does not materialize without a severe regime shift.

Nah, my main worry is precisely sustainability and optimization, i.e. cost-cutting, because the more tools you give a business to optimize, and the more bullshit excuses ("sustainability! saving the planet!") you give a business, the worse the outcome is for users (here: employees). And a lot of that is doubly annoying, because it's counter-productive.

So what you have smart sensors in every room, and combine it with badge readers and wifi trilat and what not, and have smart auto-routing/rebooking algorithm: half the week, all conference rooms are always booked full, and yet somehow when you physically go and check, a good half sits empty, and it's apparently an impossible problem to solve.

So what the bathroom wall says, "with water-saving fixtures, we're using much less water in this building", and "we're now saving 2L water per flush". It's all bullshit, because those eco inventions mean I need to flush 3 times instead of once, and it means that I spend a minute washing my hands instead of 10 seconds - especially because both the soap and the dispenser are also optimized, so it takes 20 seconds to get enough soap on your hands, and then extra 20 seconds to get it off afterwards, because unlike normal people soap, it leaves your hands slippery for some reason.

And then they say "scientists said you can dry your hands with just 2 paper towels". At that point I'm getting red, because yes, I saw that TED talk 15 years ago too, and yes, it's total bullshit. Maybe it was true then, but the industry and the beancounters have value-optimized paper towels 15 times since that.

The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.

FYI: all your comments are [flagged][dead]

I don't know why, because they all look fine to me...