Koreatown Hotel Elevator Buttons - Where do I start?
In the title of this post, I ask "where do I start?" Usually this would be a rhetorical question indicating a plethora of design problems - but in this case it's also literal, since the buttons are in such a strange order! Why would the first floor be in the bottom right, but then the rows still go up...? Even looking at it now, trying to anticipate where any button should be hurts my brain. The presence of always-confusing B1 and B2 levels sure doesn't help. The only explanation I can imagine is cultural, with the order relating somehow to the order of reading/writing the Korean language. Other than that, I'm dumbfounded...
7 comments:
I would say: start at the bottom left corner and work your way right and go up aline if the line ends. Then first you encounter two basements (B = basement?), then the ground floor (star 1), then 2, etc...
Traditional Korean is read from right to left (if I remember correctly) and in addition to that they probably wanted to list the lower levels as the bottom buttons to ensure a more 'natural' mapping.
Seems clear to me, although non-standard. Do as jasper says: start from the bottom left and go right, then up to the next row, starting again at the left.
There is no proper way to organize a long list into columns: tradition organizes the list vertically. This elevator organizes it horizontally. Either one is equally logical, although vertical is more standard.
Hangul characters in Korean, by the way, are read left to right, just like English and other European languages.
Don Norman www.jnd.org
Seems clear to me, although non-standard. Do as jasper says: start from the bottom left and go right, then up to the next row, starting again at the left.
There is no proper way to organize a long list into columns: tradition organizes the list vertically. This elevator organizes it horizontally. Either one is equally logical, although vertical is more standard.
Hangul characters in Korean, by the way, are read left to right, just like English and other European languages.
Don Norman www.jnd.org
Seems clear to me, although non-standard. Do as jasper says: start from the bottom left and go right, then up to the next row, starting again at the left.
There is no proper way to organize a long list into columns: tradition organizes the list vertically. This elevator organizes it horizontally. Either one is equally logical, although vertical is more standard.
Hangul characters in Korean, by the way, are read left to right, just like English and other European languages.
Don Norman www.jnd.org
Seems clear to me, although non-standard. Do as jasper says: start from the bottom left and go right, then up to the next row, starting again at the left.
There is no proper way to organize a long list into columns: tradition organizes the list vertically. This elevator organizes it horizontally. Either one is equally logical, although vertical is more standard.
Hangul characters in Korean, by the way, are read left to right, just like English and other European languages.
Don Norman www.jnd.org
This is the same layout as the numeric keypad on a US standard keyboard.
Nothing illogical about it.
Okay, I admit it: you're all quite right! There is indeed a logical order - I guess I just find it anything but intuitive. Looking at it more closely, I think it's the way the B2 and B1 buttons shift the standard numeric keypad positions out of place, and the way those B keys go in the opposite direction of the regular-floor keys. And Don, you're right - I would have found it more familiar if the keys had been put into vertical columns rather than rows. Thanks for keeping me honest, guys! :-)
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