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7. Buildings, especially tall buildings, are designed around elevators. In skyscrapers, making elevators even slightly faster or more efficient can have a significant positive effect on the circulation of people in the building.
User Classes
Class 1: Workers (for corporate buildings)
Age: at least 15
Frequency of Use: Daily
Motivation/Attitude: Workers would like to arrive at their floor rapidly. Workers who have to use the system on a daily basis are much more likely to be irritated if the system does not work quickly and as prescribed.
Class 2: Residents (for apartment buildings)
Age: at least 7 to operate alone, any age to use
Frequency of Use: Daily
Motivation/Attitude: While residents would like their elevator to operate efficiently, they are less likely to be in a hurry or to get irritated if the system is slow.
Class 3: Visitors
Age: at least 10 to operate alone, any age to use
Frequency of Use: Rarely
Motivation/Attitude: Visitors would also like to arrive at their floor quickly, but they are far less likely to be bothered if the system works more slowly. Since they do not use the system on a regular basis, they are more likely to be confused if the system operates differently or has a different interface than standard elevators.
The demographics for all user classes are very similar. Users can be either gender, belong to any culture, speak any language, have any level of education, experience any type of physical limitation, and have any level of computer experience.
Task Analysis
1. There will be situations where an elevator is going in the direction that the user wants to go, and maybe even passing their floor, but they should not be getting in the elevator. This will be a learning problem, in that we need to train people to only enter elevators that will be stopping on their floor. It could also be a security problem: how do we prevent someone from getting on an elevator that is headed to the top floor, and just stopping it when they get to their floor (inconveniencing their fellow passengers in the process)?
2. How do we prevent someone who wants to get to the 40th floor from exploiting the system by pressing the buttons for 40, 41, 42, 43, and 44, which would give their floor a high priority and decrease their wait time?
3. One metric that will improve our elevator algorithm is the number of people who wish to go to a particular floor. This presents an interesting interface challenge since we want to make the interface scalable (so it doesn’t look cluttered when used with hundreds of floors) and also make it safe for elevator users — we want to minimize the amount of error that results from confused people
4. One of the big differences between the traditional elevator system and our new system is that users may potentially need to walk further to get to their proper elevator. Therefore, we need to find a way to minimize the number of people rushing through each other to get to their desired elevator and/or maximize the amount of time they have to get to the elevator they need to get in. The safety aspect will be interesting — both from a physical standpoint as well as a design standpoint — since we want to make sure people can start walking to their elevators before it arrives so that they have enough time to make it there and/or walk to another elevator if they get confused (recover from errors). We want this system to be very learnable since many of the people using the system will be first-time users. This should also be efficient so that the entire process is quicker.