We’re Leaving Users to Make It Work (and this ain't Project Runway)

You step into the elevator as the doors open.

Turn to hit your floor—

…but there are no buttons.

You pause for a second.
Look around.
Check the walls again.

Nothing.

Other people are already standing there, facing forward like everything is normal.

You step back out.

There’s a touchscreen off to the side.

Not where you’d expect it.
Not labeled in a way that helps.

You hesitate.
Watch someone else.
Try to follow what they do without making it obvious.

We’ve all been there—
an elevator that doesn’t make sense,
isn’t straightforward,
or feels like it came from the future.

You tap your floor.
The screen gives you a letter.

A letter.

People move with certainty toward different elevators.

You follow.

It works.

But not in a way that makes sense the first time.
Or the second.

After a while, you learn it.

Not because it’s intuitive—
because you figured it out.

Or someone showed you.

Or you watched closely enough to piece it together.

And once you know, it’s fine.

Until someone new walks in and stops at the doorway, looking around.

You recognize it immediately.

You show them where the screen is.
How it works.
Where to go.

They laugh a little.
You do too.

An Elevator Isn’t One Thing

That elevator isn’t one thing.

It’s a set of parts, owned by different lanes—and even within those lanes, different teams.

On the software side alone:

• one team designs the touchscreen
• another handles how floors are selected
• another defines how elevators are assigned

Even within a single lane, the work is already split.

Then there are other lanes entirely—

• mechanical systems
• accessibility
• safety and regulatory requirements

Individually, each piece works.

✓ The screen responds.
✓ The system assigns.
✓ The elevators move.

From within each team, things look correct.

But the experience isn’t any one of those pieces.

And more often than not, it’s what sits between them.

• Where is the touchscreen placed?
• Is it obvious you need to use it?
• Is there anything that tells you how it works?

It doesn’t always belong cleanly to any one team—or even one lane.

So we create new ones.

Onboarding.
Enablement.
Support.

Ways to help people navigate what the system doesn’t make obvious on its own.

They help—up to a point.

So the issues don’t live inside the components.

They live between them.

In the moments where:

• you don’t know where to look
• the interaction isn’t obvious
• the system technically functions—but doesn’t really work

Users experience all the lanes—and everything that falls between them.