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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

clearly they aren't using "destination dispatch" where the elevator tells you where to wait after you tell it where you want to go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_dispatch

I've only seen this in one building. It was a little weird, but it supposedly is coming soon to more and more elevators.

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I live in a building that has this. As a resident - it works.

Whoever made this building made a whole lot of mistakes though:

- They put this into a building with public spaces (e.g. a doctor's office).

- When standing in front of the elevators, nowhere does it say which office is on which floor (it says so in the lobby which you walked by to get to the elevators)

- The screens where riders have to select floors automatically turn off after not being used for a few minutes. At that point, to people who have never used them before, they do not look like they have anything to do with the elevators at all.

- When these screens do turn on, they list the floors in reverse order (i.e. highest first). That makes sense because the people on the highest floors are the most likely to use the elevators, right? Well, all the offices are on floors 1 through 4. They're on page two of the screen. The button for "next page" is not labelled as such. You have to know it's there.

- The screens are resistive touch screens and not well calibrated. The buttons to select a floor are approximately the same height as the tip of your index finger. A first time user won't hit the correct floor the first time, guaranteed.

- At the point where you are standing in front of the elevators, you are so deep into the building that you have 0 cell reception. I have randomly encountered food delivery people be stranded there because they could not call their customers to figure out how to use the elevator.

Every single week I have to rescue a poor 80 year old person who needs to go to the doctor and is horribly lost and confused, and it just breaks my heart how the building's owner (which I've contacted about this to no avail) chose "oh the salesperson said this was more efficient and trendy" and now a large percentage of users are so much worse off for that choice.

I wonder if there is any improving that system without replacing it.

Most of the problem described here is the input mechanism. The building I work in has "destination dispatch" too but instead of a touchscreen, it has a large numeric keypad that you type your floor number on, with physical buttons that look like normal elevator buttons. We do also have some floors that are open to the public and i've only seen people confused by it a couple of times in several years of working here.

There are some easy fixes to the things I described - like adding a list of offices and floor numbers above the touchpads, or adding a phone signal boosting indoors antenna.

Apart from that, the first thing I wondered when I moved in was "oh, as a resident, does that mean I just get a keyfob I can wave at this screen that knows I live on the X-th floor?". That's also feasible, to the degree that the Wikipedia article linked above refers to this.

The problem with all these fixes is of course that they all cost more than $0.

And neither the company owning this building nor any landlord company involved in its operation is even based in the same ZIP code as the building. So why would they care?

> So why would [the landlord] care?

A complaint from one of many residents may be futile, but a complaint from the retail tenant with the largest space would carry more weight. Surely showing that this elevator decreases the value of their building would be something they'd care about, if delivered correctly.

This is such a bad use for touch screens. I worked in a building that installed them on the elevators and it was such a terrible experience. They were properly calibrated capacitive touch screens, but it was still very likely that you wouldn't get the selection you wanted. Humans can't actually aim their fingers that accurately.

If you want a fun challenge, try making your own elevator algorithm! https://play.elevatorsaga.com/

At the end of the workday, not having several full elevators stop on their way down to the lobby to try (and fail) to take you down from the second floor is a godsend to everyone involved.

2nd floor? You need the exercise.

I stayed at a hotel that used this. It's a very nice, efficient system. Much better than everybody cramming into the next elevator that arrives and selecting a bunch of floors.

I worked in a building at NYC that did this. It was confusing at first as I just immediately jumped into the first elevator door that opened since it was my first day and didn't realize there were no buttons inside. After the initial and very short learning curve due to all the stairs I had to climb that day I would say it was much more efficient than any other building I had been in.

I encountered one that did this, but the screen for selecting your floor was a temperamental touch screen, so trying to type "13" would often select "1" and "11" before 13, consigning you to riding and stopping at those floors, also.

Then I found the secret wheel-chair button assortment, which was genuine buttons.

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