FLIRTing with the Crowds

Time to rant a bit, since I’ve been very positive lately: which gadget, service, building or vehicle offers the most irritating & frustrating user experience in your daily life? For me it definitely has to be the elevator. Any given elevator usually has some or all of these exquisitely gut wrenching feats:

• When you push the button to order it, it doesn’t give you any indication as to which of the four elevators in the row will be the next to arrive
• Naturally, you miss the indicators showing you which elevators are currently on which floor so you can’t even speculate, only guess (this is particularly an issue e.g. in department stores where there are more people going to the elevator than any one elevator fits).
• When the elevator finally reaches your floor, it the indicator (up/down arrow or floor number) lights up way too early, causing you to yank the door a couple of times only to find it impossible to open.
• 1 second after the indicator light has tricked you, a friendly beeper announces the arrival of the elevator - way too early again, causing you to yank the door a couple of times only to find it impossible to open.
• When the elevator finally opens its doors and people are able to stuff themselves in, there is absolutely no indicator as to how far back you need to be from the doors in order to not get picked up by the system preventing the doors to trap people’s limbs between them. This causes a couple of failed attempts by the elevator to close its doors, causing some tens of seconds delay.
• When you reach your desired floor, once again the indicator and the sound play tricks on you, but eventuall, you get where you wanted, which is supposed to make everything alright. Right?

Some of the elevators counter many of these non-transparency-related problems by being, well, transparent. They are also getting much faster nowadays, but the aforementioned problems still are to be found in too many elevators. That was my Sunday rant.

But yeah, since blogs are all about conversation, let’s give you a voice, what kind of user interfaces you find off-putting in your daily life? (there might not be too many of you reading this since I just restarted this blog, but hey, it’s free).