- So, this is frustrating.
The elevator buttons in our office building
work some of the time.
You get in, scan your badge, there's a beep,
you hit your floor, and maybe the button lights up,
or maybe it doesn't.
I've been quietly documenting this
for the past few mornings.
It's bad enough that everyone in the building
has their own theories about how the buttons work.
- You basically just like, mash them.
- Press the button and nothing happens,
so you do it again.
- I don't do the ta ta ta ta ta,
I do the push hard.
- And seriously, temperatures run hot.
- I think like, all common decency kind of like,
goes out the window.
- It is noticeably problematic.
- There's no rules.
- Okay cool, I'm going here,
and that's just take you right up, but it doesn't.
- [William] Bad buttons are infuriating,
and they're everywhere,
but if you've ever wanted to destroy a button
out of frustration, it's not your fault.
(alarm beeping)
Buttons rule our lives.
Seriously, think about all the buttons you press
just between waking up in the morning
and going to work.
Button pressing is a simple example of
human-machine interaction,
a form of communication between us and computers.
When that communication works smoothly,
you tend not to notice it.
When it doesn't, it can be a small hiccup in your day,
or a nonstop torment,
and in our office, thanks to bad buttons,
regrettable things have happened.
- Elevators are one of the great nightmares of my life.
- [William] This is my coworker, Casey.
He has a complicated relationship with elevators.
He actually got stuck in one in our old building.
- It was kind of a "Final Destination" situation.
- [Woman] Casey, Casey!
- [William] And the elevators in this building--
- They have the worst buttons of any elevator
that I've ever used.
- [William] Casey is on team jam the buttons really hard.
- Violently stabbing the button with my finger.
- [William] Which set some events in motion.
One day, in the elevator, he and a building manager
got into an argument about button pushing.
- [William] If you, if you recognize these.
The building escalated things.
- (laughs) I do recognize them.
These signs filled me with so much rage.
- [William] A few days later, these signs showed up
inside the elevators, and Casey,
in an act of civil disobedience, tore them down.
Bad move.
- Well, I learned pretty quickly thereafter
that it turns out there are security cameras in elevators.
- [William] Casey got caught, there was an inquest,
HR got involved.
Ultimately, it blew over, though he's not
totally over it.
- Let me just read this, for the court.
Please press the elevevator button gently, thank you.
Elevevator.
I was like, go hire a copy editetitor.
- Okay, why are these buttons tearing our office apart?
Well, the answer has to lie in the logic behind the buttons.
So, we tried to figure that logic out.
One, two, three, four.
We're filming a video to try to figure out
what's wrong with our elevator buttons.
- Oh, I hate this.
- We're gonna try again.
One, two, three,
four, five and a half, beep.
One, beep.
Pause, eight.
We got it!
Oh, I feel motion sick, this is not a joke.
I need to get off this elevator now.
I can't do this anymore.
(elevator dinging)
So, we think we cracked the code,
but before we pick it all apart,
I want a professional eye on what we found.
- I'm Rachel Plotnick, assistant professor
of cinema and media studies at Indiana University.
- [William] Rachel is a true button academic.
She wrote an entire book on the very first electric buttons.
They popped up in the late 1800's,
alongside the earliest deployments of consumer electricity.
- One was doorbells, of course,
and only if you had sort of a upper class,
wealthy household would you even have a doorbell.
It wasn't a common thing that would appear
on everyone's house.
- Elevator buttons were actually there
from the beginning, too.
Around 1887, the Otis Elevator Company showed off
its push button design.
Rachel says they actually helped popularize
the term automatic.
Also, fun fact, our elevator, an Otis.
Well, that's a good segue to talk about my elevator.
- The dreaded elevator.
So, here's what we found.
It's 9:00 AM, you walk into the elevator,
you scan your badge, you get a beep.
There's a one to two second pause,
and then a magical window of about five seconds opens up.
During that time, if you press the right floor button,
it'll light up and away you go,
but the catch is, hitting your floor doesn't reset
that window for the next person.
So, if you walk into a crowded elevator
and you scan your badge after someone else has,
you'll get a beep, but that beep is a lie.
Your button will be dead to you,
no matter how many times you hit it.
You have to wait til the magic window closes
and the whole system resets.
Yeah, so your thoughts on that.
- That sounds like a true nightmare.
- Rachel felt our pain, but she also had ideas
about why we're suffering.
The elevator systems are tricky because they're not
simple on-off switches like lights,
and they're not instantaneous activators like doorbells.
They're triggers, they set in motion a whole hidden logic.
- [Rachel] Once you've sort of started that process,
there may not be an off button, right,
it's just initiating the process
but there's no retracting the process.
- In lieu of control, what you need is clear feedback,
evidence that your button press did something,
which we don't have.
There's a beep, but it's worthless because it happens
whether the buttons unfreeze or not.
- That the cues or directions aren't clear,
as well as the feedback isn't clear,
then we're just sort of left in the lurch as users
to say, what comes next, what am I doing,
and did this actually work or not?
- But Rachel thinks in this case, feedback is just a piece
of the puzzle.
In fact, she pointed out a very basic thing,
the buttons aren't really the problem.
The security system is.
- That seems to me to be more of the problem in your story
rather than the buttons themselves,
is that whatever verification process is occurring,
it's sort of overriding what can happen with the buttons.
- Right now, our elevators are in charge
of security clearance and transportation.
So, there's a choke point inside the cars themselves.
Lots of other offices handle security
with little turnstiles before the elevators.
The elevators themselves just do their job.
Obviously, we can't change our building's security,
but we can make one small difference.
- I could see that if everyone in your workplace
had a better understanding of how it worked,
they may have some more patience about it.
- [William] That we can do.
- A delay of five seconds?
- Oh, so you have to wait for it to--
- That makes sense, kind of.
- I'm glad to know a grounded in reality theory
for what's happening here.
- [William] We also broke the news to Casey.
- That's what they should have put on the sign
that they put in the elevator!
That would have been a useful sign,
I never would have tore down that sign!
- Which, good idea.
This feels pretty passive-aggressive,
but it's accurate.
So, this is not the most elegant way to fix the problem.
It engages with the buttons on their terms,
which is kind of missing the point when it comes to design,
but buttons are gonna keep running your life,
and they're not always gonna play nice,
so sometimes, it's worth a truce.
- I think we have this kind of inherent fantasy and desire
to make them want to just spring forth
whatever it is that we want,
but it rarely ever works that way.
- So, we at The Verge clearly love our buttons,
and if you do, too, you should check out
a couple of our other projects.
We have a podcast called "Why'd You Push That Button?"
and a series of articles called "Button of the Month."
We'll leave links to both of those in the description,
and thanks for watching.