Saturday, June 16, 2007

Shouldn't there be an 'Undo' Feature in Elevators?

Shouldn't there be an 'Undo' Feature in Elevators?

Today while using the elevator to reach my floor by mistake by pressed the floor number which is next to me. Oops! Ouch! And I had to give all expressions for the mistake, as we normally do. But being a machine following our orders systematically, the Johnson's product religiously took my order, went step-by-step and stopped in the floor next and then again went to my floor.

I was feeling bad that the little elevator's effort and time was unnecessarily wasted in stopping at a floor which was not necessary. I do understand that for operator-powered elevators, the operator has full control on where the elevators should stop and also to ensure that the lift goes to a designated floors non-stop. However, similar to our software applications, can the elevator companies too make this 'Undo Floor Selection' a standard option. However, I admit that they should ensure that frequent press of this key should somehow be discouraged.  I am just saying 'somehow' since I am not much exposed to elevator designs and hence presenting this as a common man's aspiration.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice feature request.. may be you should contact some good elevator company and give them this feedback.
Some test cases that comes to the mind to implement it...

What if say Floor 5 is selected and now when the lift is moving you unselect and select floor -1 ?

So unselection cannot happen when the lift is on move or may be when its the only destination pressed or the when its the next destination in that direction.