Design an elevator.

larifying questions:

Who are we designing the elevator experience for? Is this for a residential or commercial users? - commercial

Who are we when designing this experience? - Google

Is there a known business scope for this improvement such as increase adoption, engagement, user experience, safety? - open ended

Are there any known pain points for the users? - no

 

Goal of the existing product; 

Primary goal: take passengers from floor A to floor B quickly. 

Secondary goal: take people with mobility issues who cannot use stairs, call operator if there are issues, take deliveries from floor A to B, take heavy items, office supplies and other good from floor A to B

 

User personas:

• Employees of the business

• Housekeeping staff

• Customers of the business

• Visitors, Friends/family of the employees

 

Pain points with the existing experience?

1. Employees that arrive in the AM, forgot coffee 

2. Employees forgot their badge needed to get to their floor

3. Employee made a mess in the elevator but needs to go to a meeting

4. Visitors (customers, friends family) do not know which floor to get to.

5. Housekeeping staff doesn’t know when elevator requires maintenance

6. Maintenance/Delivery crew doesn’t know when they can use the elevator without affecting others experience 

 

Features:

1. Biometrics kiosk in the elevator for the employees and visitors (register at the front desk) for entry, automatic floor selection based on the access.

2. Smart sensing technology that allows maintenance crew to track the elevator conditions

3. Water/coffee dispenser in the elevator that one can configure as per their arrival time

4. Optimization algorithm that enables housekeeping, heavy items delivery to be scheduled for a time when the traffic is low.

 

How will I implement these features?

 

 

Summary:

I would improve elevator experience by adding a biometric authentication for users that provides automated floor selection for their trip.

I would also like to add a secondary feature that will alert housekeeping staff when the elevator needs attention. Beginning with a kiosk that allows users to notify the staff quickly by selecting what the issue is. Over time, this feature can be turned into a smart sensing elevator that can communicate the details to the staff over wifi.

 

Measure success?

User adoption: # users that use biometrics for elevator usage over time DAU/MAU/YAU

% growth in New users that sign up over time DAU/MAU/YAU

 

If the metrics are performing well, that’s a good sign. If the adoption is suddenly not looking good, we can deep dive into the areas whether the biometrics profiles are taking users to the right floor. If not identify the area that needs improvement.

Clarification questions/Assumptions

1. Assuming it is not just escalator and a lift to carry the passengers

2. Assuming the lift is used only for lifting the passengers and it is not a service lift

3. Assuming the lift/elevator is meant to be installed only in high rise building and not for the personal posch low rise villas or low rise apartments

4. Assuming we are building a product as elevator and not any application to control the generic/conventional elevators.

Goal of the product

1. Considering the product is already a known one and at a growth stage. Hence, we want to shift the focus of customers by providing a hitech solution for a premium price. Objective is to increase the revenue

User Segment

1. High Rise Apartments- Either builders who are constructing for the users or the owners of the apartments who will use the lifts

2. Individual users who are using the lifts in those apartments, an outsider

3. Societies who are managing the apartment facility

4. Advance multi-speciality hospitals as an organisation who is managing the facility

- Doctors, Patients, atttenders, employees and alled team working in the hospital

5. Public places like malls, offices

I would like to pick hospitals and the associated people using the elevators for this use case as there is high sense of urgency involved in the hopsitals be it a patient, doctor, attenders or the other allied departments like OT, ICU, Autobsey etc.

Pain Points

Earlier people use to have elevators with channel gates and shutters which use to be very unsafe. Now a days we have totally covered elevators but it has its own challenges.

1. Long waiting queues outside the lifts

2. Everybody be it patient attenders doctors staff use to get cloggged in one lift even if it is meant only for patient use.

3. A patient on the strecher bed with ICU on wheel/ambulance always struggles in case of emergency to take him out from ambulance, change the strrecher bed, take him to the elevator once the elevator comes then he get shifted to the required place. Also there is always a space congestion

4. Death are common in the hospitals, in case of patient died in the private room or OT makes it difficult to bring him down in the high rise buildings through an isolated passage. Usually due to the hospital infrastructure dead bodies are carried out thru the normal patient and OPD crowd which creates lack of confidence amongst the other patients and the attenders

5. Space crunch in the metro citities even for the advance hospitals is a major pain point

6. At times kids use to lock themselves in the elevators

7. People tend to break the queues .Those who use to wait for a long take a back seat and doesn not get a chance to occupy the elevator on time.

8. Pregnant women , phycially challenged, old age people suffers due to discomfort in the elevators and at times poor management of the lifts poses of threat of accidents or lift being stuck in between without any light and air

9. New passengers does not know at which specific floors they have to go for the required departments. Hence, ended up wasting time while wandering to many floors

Solution

There are various paint points that needs to be addressed but considering safety and time as utmost priority for the ill patients, i would like to prioritise the pain points under these 2 catagories

1. waiting time indicator (countdown) with status update message can help to find out how much time has been left to reach the lift and what is the reason if it is stuck for a long time, is it for soe maintnace, emergency can be displayed

2. Thumb impression punching or a token no. allotment whith scanner to prioritise the passenger where the most needy once should get the first priority or for the normal passengers earliest come should get a chance to enter in the lift on priority

3. Small kids if by mistake enters alone in the elevator then they system should not lock the gate and should not move the lift instead a msg should go loud that either accompanied by a major person or go out of the lift. The age identification can be done with help of size of finger impression or an ibuilt camera that recognise the age while capturing the image inside the lift

4. An info can be displayed within the lift against each floor that can help in idenfying the required areas within the floor with navigation

5.  If the user is in a normal, young, healthy state and wants to access the lift for the immediate next floor then the elevator should be to advise there is a staircase just beside the elevator would you like to use the same and you can reach in roughly X seconds to the specific floor while lift will take X+Y mintues to reach out to you.

6. There should be multiple lifts for the spcific cases based on the infrastucture like OT, ICU etc. If garbage is mistakenly taken inside the passenger lift by the housekeeping staff then lift should not move and open the door with a message that garbage can be taken out from the passenger lift. Smell sensors within the left should help to make the identification.

7. Last  Maintiance and cleaning date time should be displayed inside the lift and in case of any emergency if the lift gets locked then it should trigger a loud auto alarm with the phone call to the maintaince team.

8. The time should be displayed to the respective team for how long the passenger has been stuck in the lift and displayed in the system of the maintaince team

9. Even in case of power cut there should be battery support that should provide back till generator is on and open the lift to the next nearest floor

10. There should be an integrated systme inside the lift that can help in managing the commuication with the outsider in case lift get stuck and the person inside the lift should get status on the action taken. Hence, this will provide a sense of relelif to the passenger who is locked

Prioritisation

I would like to prioritise the solution based on the impact to the users, business value/criticallity, cost, time to implement and the number of users getting impacted.

Keeping the above factors in consideration

1 - P1

2 - P1

3 - P2

4- P2

5- P3

6- P2

7- P3

8- P1

9- P1

10- P1