The elevator in my building is relatively simple to operate… But judging from the occasional bell ring I can hear from my apartment, people get confused with the bottom row of the panel. The buttons for the five floors are close enough to their legend and distant enough from each other to make it a clear choice. There’s even Braille although I would have to check with a blind person to know if it’s working for them.

Fortunately they thought of putting a star next to the number 1. Too often I see, especially in buildings with a basement, an assortment of letters the user has to guess… Sometimes there’s LL or B for the basement, and G for Ground Floor which could just be 1, because this one user (me) keeps thinking it’s for Garage while LL suggests Lobby…

The problem with the bottom row is that it contains both a frequently used pair of buttons to request door opening and closing, as well as two buttons that trigger the alarm. It isn’t clear if the “In Emergency Press Button” calls for help, as that is the purpose of the phone device in the closet below…

So here’s what happens with me, a sample of one user. I call the elevator, enter it (usually with my bicycle), press the button nearest my floor number, and then reach for the “Door Close”… and I stop for a moment, to study the layout every time. I look at “Door Close” which is not a button, and I see two identical buttons on each side. Since there is nothing to the right of the rightmost button, I can only conclude that is the “Door Close” button.

Incidentally the “Stop Run” switch will ring the bell, but the Bell icon to the right is in case of emergency… In all likelihood people moving furniture will try to switch it to “Stop” but the sound of the bell will be such a detriment that they will resort to other means to block the elevator door (in itself a problem as I have heard the elevator technician say that there is a “time out” which completely disables the elevator – requiring a service call).

Presumably the designer of this elevator is using a standard tool set provided by the designer of all elevators, so it could be tricky to figure out a solution for users without access to, say, different types of switches (the Emergency button might be made less accessible, for example), and also to test different layouts with users. I would try grouping the “Door Open” and “Door Close” buttons, for example, maybe even have the legends on each side so there’s no confusion. But it would need to be checked with several users with different backgrounds (find someone with dyslexia, or from a culture that doesn’t read left-to-right, too).