This week we've collected some benchmark data for our study on why people take the elevator or the stairs when traveling to the 4th floor (ITP). We sent out this survey and so far have received around 70 responses, which is enough to influence our design decisions and better inform the visual cues that we'd like to employ in order to persuade people to take the stairs more often.
We also benchmarked traffic to both the elevators and the stairs last week. From 11:45am-12:45pm on Friday, October 4, around 500 people passed by the building lobby, and around 25% took the stairs. This surprised us as we thought the number would be much lower (around 10%). Our plan is to run the balloon prototype this Friday, October 11, in the same time slot and determine if we can observe any change in behavior.
The prototype would be a simple proof of concept, since over time the visual cues of the balloons might decay (people would realize the balloons aren't actually guiding them anywhere except the stairs), and ideally we would have more reinforcing events such as adding design elements (audio/visual) in the stairwell. Furthermore, we'd like to run these small prototypes on different days and get an average, so we can have a better idea of the impact of our design, rather than having it constrained to one day.