The Elevator:
humble servant, or so we hope.

Dozens of folks are helped every day by this elevator, which links three floors of a busy student center at the local university.

	Of course, it has a user interface. Let’s take a look! Fourth Floor entrance We have a button with an arrow. We’re at the top; if we were in the middle there would be an “Up” button also.
Third Floor entrance Just one floor down, we face a very different prospect. We might prefer to use the stairs, if possible. I’ve pressed the “Up” button, so it’s lit.

Here are the design problems with the third floor panel:

• The panel has a title, Firefighters’ Operations.
  I am not a firefighter. Also I’ve been warned to never use an elevator in a fire (a warning delivered with deliciously graphic force in the 1974 movie The Towering Inferno). I should probably step away.
• The two disks in the middle are the Up and Down buttons, but they don’t look like buttons. To add to the uncertainty, the fire-hat symbol clearly presents itself as a button. That means the other items are likely to be something else. (Remember, when you step up to the elevator there’s no red light as seen in the photo.)
• Not only do these disks not look like buttons, they don’t have any labels indicating Up or Down. The nearest label says Fire Recall. I’m all for recalling fires, but again my authority on this point is doubtful.
• It looks like you need to have one of those cute barrel-shaped keys to get this thing going. I’m out of luck on that point too.

Maybe this uninviting design is deliberate. In the overall design of the building, the third floor entrance is the most easily found of the three; maybe the idea is to discourage frivolous use. Certainly anyone who has mischievously pulled a fire alarm would take pause before pressing the Third Floor buttons. Or … hmm … maybe the Third Floor portal is really for use by Daleks?

It’s easier to assume this is merely a bad use of design for the controls.

I typically think about “user interface” in the context of software and web development. The basic concept is making a device available to a person; obviously that applies to an elevator as easily as it does to an Internet application, such as a search engine form. The challenges and pitfalls are the same in many ways.

My design goal for a screen display is to invite the user to fill in some entry fields and press a “Submit” button. To succeed, the entry fields must look like text can be put there, and the button must look like a button. There is much more to user interface design than the graphic layout. But it’s important to see that with the elevator, the specific reasons why the Fourth Floor is good and the Third Floor is awful are ones that apply to software. Of the “ten heuristics (principles) for user interfaces” developed by Jakob Nielsen, two are at stake:

Match between system and the real world
The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
[NOTE: See, he even mentions platforms!]

This may all seem too obvious to even mention. My point is simply that you don’t have to go to the computer to find user interfaces. User functionality is a vast discipline for computer professionals, but its principles are worked out all around us every day. We each have countless opportunities to study and learn.