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Smylers writes:
<snip>
> And we never did work out what the decimal point was for.
My guess was mezzanines ("2.5" meaning "second-floor mezzanine), but,
naturally, there weren't any of those in the building.
Smylers has mentioned only a few of the UI problems with this particular
lift.
The buttons were some peculiar touch-sensitive thing that either (a)
wasn't particularly touch-sensitive, or (b) was too touch-sensitive, and
therefore needed a software-imposed delay before actually accepting your
input. I saw a lot of people have genuine difficulties actually getting
the buttons to do anything. Somehow this was considered better than
just having buttons with affordances that encourage, you know, actually
pushing.
At each floor, the outside-the-lift controls consisted of a single
'call' button. That's fine on the lowest and the highest floors --
there's only one thing you can do. But if you're on the ground floor,
and you want to take the lift to the second floor (either because you're
carrying something, or because you're a lazy git like me) then calling
the lift is interpreted as 'call to go down'. (Presumably the reason
for it being down rather than up was that the car park was in the
basement and couldn't be accessed by foot.)
And the effect of this? Suppose you call the lift from the ground floor
just as the lift itself is leaving the basement to carry people to the
top floor. Then the damn thing just sails straight past you, because it
'knows' that letting you in is useless. So you have to wait for it to
get all the way to the top and back again for you to get in -- whereupon
it might well go down to the basement again if someone's called the lift
=66rom there in the meantime.
This particular brand of insanity was only slightly alleviated by the
fact that you could get in the lift at the ground floor, while it was on
its way to collect someone who'd called it from the basement, and
override the control software's decision to go the basement next merely
by repeatedly pressing the button for a higher floor. I felt rather
guilty doing that, so I avoided it as much as possible.
(And I claim this is still on-topic, because I managed to shoehorn the
lift's control software into that last paragraph.)
--=20
Aaron Crane
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