Wow. I never thought about it. The UI is wrong. You need to tell the elevator where you want to go. The elevator needs to tell you when to get on and off and maybe how long you have to wait. That is all.
The list of floors should be on the outside. Selecting the floor should act as the call. A display beside the button should count down until the elevator going to that floor arrives. (And in multi-person, multi-elevator situations, perhaps a color or number should tell you which door it will be).
The existing UI expects you to understand the elevator algorithm in order to operate it. That's wrong. It's unnecessary mental work for the users and locks you into one algorithm. What if you want to optimally handle this case?
7:
6:
5: Guy going to floor 4
4:
3:
2: Guy going to floor 7
1: Elevator
Ah, but if you had all those buttons, which would you push? Where you are, or where you're going? The same logic which causes some people to push down to go up would cause some people to push the floor they're on, because they want the elevator to come to them.
I, personally, would love to have that sort of display. But the added cost of the buttons & lights & damages / abuses probably wouldn't be worth it. (anyone, anywhere, can cause the elevator to visit every floor. It's almost as bad as putting control of the elevator onto a public website)
And the same person will stare at the panel until the button for the current floor appears. I've seen this behavior in humans before. It's not a pleasant experience.
If a person cannot understand that a button will not spontaneously form on a physical panel, cannot understand the basic laws of reality and physics, then they shouldn't be let outside or out of the care of others. There is nothing you can design that would work for someone with that kind of mental disability.
Aside from the "not letting out" part, that's essentially the point.
The current system works wonderfully for 99.9% of people. Redesigning everything for the last 0.1% isn't worth it, since they can either be simply taught by a passer-by or they're incapable of learning it.
I dare say everyone is guilty of at least one massive oversight like this. If everyone guilty of one were quarantined, there'd be no-one left.
One way around this is to have a label for the current floor, but no button next to it, just metal plating. Then it's obvious that there is no way to select the current floor.
I have it in my building and although it is intuitive to use, sometimes I find myself waiting far longer than I think i should be for normal 'up down' button systems.
My building has it too. It is sometimes confusing, such as when you're in a pre-coffee daze and step into an elevator without punching in your floor. Because there are no floor buttons inside, you end up riding to wherever you can get off and use the elevator correctly. That said, it works as it's designed to. It's a rare event to share a car with people going to other floors.
The list of floors should be on the outside. Selecting the floor should act as the call. A display beside the button should count down until the elevator going to that floor arrives. (And in multi-person, multi-elevator situations, perhaps a color or number should tell you which door it will be).
The existing UI expects you to understand the elevator algorithm in order to operate it. That's wrong. It's unnecessary mental work for the users and locks you into one algorithm. What if you want to optimally handle this case?