The Marriott Marquis in New York City (where I recently stayed for the 2005 Forrester Consumer Forum) has an elevator setup unlike any other I’ve come across. But before I get into what made them so special, I need to get this out of the way: The elevators were widely seen to be a complete nightmare by everyone staying at the hotel. At times, you could wait 20 minutes just to catch one, and when it finally came it would be so packed that you couldn’t even get in. On one occasion, people had to actually get out of an elevator because it was so overloaded, it could not work properly. This, however, seemed to be less related to the design of the elevator “interface” and more related to the fact that only a couple elevators (out of 12-15) seemed to be working at any given time. The Marquis is a huge Times Square hotel — two or three elevators can’t possibly support that traffic.

Anyway, the big difference between these elevators and every other one you’ve ever been in is in the order of things: One who wants to use the elevator must enter the destination floor BEFORE getting on. If this is done correctly, the computer behind the scenes spits out which elevator to ride (labelled by letter). Once inside an individual unit, there are no buttons — it will stop at your floor if you have pre-entered the number and followed the instructions correctly. I’ve included a photo of the keypad itself at right. To operate, you enter the floor number on the numbered keypad, then wait for the chosen elevator to appear on the little screen.

I’m told that the Marquis used to have regular elevators. I’m also told that there was a sign in every elevator warning customers to allow 45 minutes to get down to the street if they were attending a show. Clearly, the existing system was not working for the Marquis because of sheer mass overload, so they came up with a new system (a rather ingenious one at that). By having users enter their destination before stepping on the elevator, the computer can equally distribute traffic to the elevators, and could also seemingly make each unit more efficient by keeping certain elevators in specific sections of the building. Of course, we all quickly learned that it takes more than two working elevators for this system to actually work!

The other big obstacle this system has is that nobody knows how the elevators work. I’ve been in countless buildings and countless elevators in my life, and this was the first time I had to be shown how to use the system. Once I understood, it made perfect sense, but the inherent difficulty with any paradigm shift like this is the initial confusion it may cause. That being said, this was still an advantageous change for the Marquis because of the existing problem. Although it might take a minute for a new guest to learn and understand the system, as a customer I would much rather take a minute or two up front to learn a new system than wait 45 minutes to use the flawed older system.

Now if they could only get all the elevators working!