Sketching exercise to unfold your product opportunities
Last Christmas while I was struggling to buy a present for my family on “El Corte Ingles” website, I had a revelation and decided to employ my questioning of reality to a more fruitful enterprise (other than GAD). I embarked myself in the challenging mission of making websites a better place. Went on Coursera, hit that search button and bam! “Introduction to UX principles and process” Here we go!
Why having a basic understanding of UX principles?
I bet everyone has ever found herself going back and forth on a website trying to find something, perhaps entering ten thousand times information that resulted in an invalid input or not knowing how to exit one of the website's sections without hitting the back button in the browser, to quote some examples. I hardly ever come back to a website that has made me have a mental meltdown. No matter how cheap the product they were selling, no matter how convenient service they offer. Sometimes they’re hard to avoid: the booking system of your next door gym, the schedule of the local buses, etc. But what happens if you don’t offer a niche service, what if you’re an e-commerce website trying to break-through competitors? Then, my friend you need to know your UX. No one notices good UX, but everyone can tell when yours suck.
Going back to the Coursera course. I found it highly recommendable to anyone who wants to gain a basic understanding of UX design and its principles. It doesn't take a big deal of time and I started using this right away in Busuu. This post is about one of the exercises of the course: Sketching 10 solutions for the highest elevator in the world. In Busuu I have done sketches during design sprints but I’ve never reflected on how useful it is to use your eyes and the world around you to identify problems and solutions. This is why this exercise was great fun and challenging since I’m not as acquainted with lifts as I'm with the apps I work with.
Let’s sketch!
Look around you, pick an object and think about why you use it and what is the opportunity to make the object better, easier to use or fitter for its purpose, then start sketching solutions until you run out of ideas (no matter how crazy you go). If you can’t think of any, start with the worst solution. Oh! And don’t spend too long doing this exercise, this is like one of the newspaper sudokus. You don’t want to get obsessed and spend hours, just to do a bit of a mental workout.
The best part of doing this regularly is that you become less attached to find THE BEST solution to a problem, just a solution and hey, that works wonders if you work developing or designing products.
10 Sketches for alternative control interfaces for a 10,000 floor elevator
“In this assignment, you will design alternative control interfaces for an elevator. A really long elevator. An elevator that can service all of the floors of a 10,000 floor building. Nevermind that such a building, at 30,000 meters (100,000 feet, or roughly 3-4 times higher than Mt. Everest) could probably not be built given current technology. Do consider, though, that at 20.5 m/s (the current top speed for an elevator, a record held by Shanghai Tower), it would take nearly 30 minutes to reach the top floor if there were no stops in between. Also consider that an elevator servicing so many floors would need to move a lot of people, suggesting a capacity of dozens, if not hundreds, of passengers.”
Sketch 1: Only call buttons
Pros:
- Simplicity, no long times with people entering the floor number.
- The time panel on the top tells me how long is the wait and inside the lift I can see approximately how long it’ll take me to go to my floor.
Cons:
- Long time waiting and as it’s stopping on each floor it can get a bit annoying when lift is almost empty.
- Lifting your head can give you a bit of neck pain. Not fit for people with sight impairment or with limited mobility.
- Lack of control when on board, no buttons to call for help or emergency stop.
Solution (after considering constraints): little and often
Sketch 2: Operated like a train with different preset lines
Pros:
- Works like a train with different lines/ floor stops.
- You can skip rides and take the express ride.
- The panel in the lobby indicates the time left to your ride and inside the lift you can see the progress plus benchmark times between stops/floors.
Cons:
- Lack of control when on board, no buttons to call for help or emergency stop.
- Wait can get a bit long between lines/ floor stops.
- You will need a queue system to organise the number of people riding the lift.
- Accessibility needed: audio for sight impaired.
Solution (after considering constraints): Assistance panel
Sketch 3: Two way audio and stop button
Pros:
- Simplicity, no controls outside but inside you can request the stop when your floor is called.
- It’ll go really fast to your floor if you don’t need to stop it.
- The audio helps people with sight problems.
Cons:
- Lack of knowledge of ride times.
- Lack of visual help to know where you are.
- The audio can get annoying if you go to the last floors.
- Potentially the speed will need to be adjusted to the audio so you can select your stop when called.
Solution (after considering constraints): Ding sound and help buttons
Sketch 4: Modular lift with in-between escalators
Pros:
- This lift goes in modules so it is a continuous flow of people.
- It has breaks in between if you get panicky about being in a lift with potentially many people.
- The escalator makes it easy if you don’t want to wait or if you go for instance to floor 1001.
Cons:
- It can get annoying for people to switch lifts every time they get to the top of a module.
- It will take really long to get to the top.
- No indication of times, even 100 floors if you stop at every floor can get painfully slow.
- It moves the design problem away to the escalator.
Solution (after considering constraints): More info, report controls
Sketch 5: Group floor selection in lobby
Pros:
- You select the group of floors on the lobby and just wait for your group to be called.
- In doing so you can prioritise floor groups based on the times people tap on the buttons.
Cons:
- It can take ages for your group to be called if you’re the only one waiting.
- It will still take long because the lift stops at every floor.
- No buttons inside that make you feel in control, call for help or report an emergency.
Solution (after considering constraints): With controls
Sketch 6: Two lifts in lobby (one regular, one express)
Pros:
- One regular lift (stopping at all floors) and one express lift if you need to go fast to the top.
- It has two panels so people don’t need to move to the other side to press buttons inside.
- There are two buttons to stop or report an emergency.
- Two lifts can potentially be scheduled to do different trips if necessary.
Cons:
- This is not a great solution, what if you need to go to floor 9,000 (of 10,000) you will need to wait ages for your lift to get to your floor, if there’s too many people calling in between floors.
- Two lifts can occupy too much space and they can get too heavy for the building structure.
Solution (after considering constraints): Back to one lift system with different rides
Sketch 7: App controlled lift, book a slot
Pros:
- You have lots of information available at a hand.
- The app can contain status, times, even can work so you book a slot so the queuing system speeds up.
- It can be developed taking into consideration accessibility.
Cons:
- An app requires external development and thus is costly.
- You will need to have WiFi and / or your phone with you.
- Ideally you should have some control in case the app doesn’t work.
Solution (after considering constraints): WiFi and manual controls in lift
Sketch 8: Modular “paternoster” lift
Pros:
- No stops, it is very cool as a concept.
- As it’s modular you can control the speed so people can get off relatively easy.
- Runs very often so no long waiting times.
- It has a button to stop in case it’s needed.
Cons:
- It could be dangerous.
- Slower than a regular lift.
- The number of people per lift should be lower than in a regular lift.
Solution (after considering constraints): Add doors and make it a continuous lift
Sketch 9: Three way queue group
Pros:
- As queues fill in, lifts to a X range of floors will be prioritised.
- Time indicators outside tell you how long your queue wait is.
Cons:
- Potentially you will need to wait longer if only a small group of people queue for your group of floors.
- Even if you split queues in 1,000 floors, you will need to wait longer if the lift stops on every floor.
- No indicators of how long will take you to get to X floor.
- No buttons to report an incident or emergency.
Solution (after considering constraints): Reduce the number of floor range and set up “departing times”
Sketch 10: Personal / visiting card operated lift
Pros:
- Saves you time as you will just use a card to operate the lift.
- Practical for an office building.
Cons:
- All guests will need to have a card.
- Potentially the cards can stop working and the lift will need to be operated manually.
- No indicators of time to your floor.
Solution (after considering constraints): Add a regular lift panel inside
Last notes:
This exercise was meant to take a couple of hours, I took a couple of days. That’s why doing exercises like this regularly is so important: they make you less attached to a solution (or idea), open to try new things and recover from mistakes easily.