The idea first occurred to me, as so many good ideas do, while I was (you guessed it!) waiting for an elevator.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “How in the world is she possibly going to squeeze more principles of User Experience and Product Design out of elevator buttons???”
Well let me show you!
To start, let’s take a look at these lovely elevator call buttons:
At first glance, there’s nothing wrong with them. Left is clearly to go up, right is clearly to go down. Wunderbar**.**
But, we can make them better.
For one, these are the button equivalent of Norman Doors.* They need signage to indicate function. Remove the arrows, and you’d be completely stumped as to which button to press in order to go up.
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*For those not in the field, Norman Doors (named after the forefather of UX, Don Norman) are a type of door that is confusing to open: it’s not clear from the handle if you should push or pull. A sign will usually supplement the handle and tell you which action to take. The idea behind these is that a well designed door doesn’t need to rely on words to tell you how to use it - its design communicates that effectively, instantly, and subconsciously. That is a principle we as designers, strive to carry across into everything we make.
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But we don’t need signage to tell us what is up and what’s down - we just need to tap into people’s metal models of how the world works.
So here are our buttons again, this time rearranged and with redundant signage removed: