Flummoxed Floors

A lift at the University of Sheffield.  Rather than numbering the floors, here they are lettered.  To be fair part if the problem is caused by the building being on a hill with ground level being one floor different front and back of the building, but is's a poor solution.

Letters can work as 'ordinal scale' in that there is an known order.  But numbers often work better as labels as their order seems to be more intuitively natural.  That's because numbers are and 'interval scale' where the difference between the numbers (the 'interval) has some meaning....the fifth floor is three floors up from floor two.  Rather than floor K being three floors up from floor B.  We can more easily add or subtract with numbers that we can with letters in the alphabet.

Try 'counting' backwards through the alphabet.  What's the letter two before I? Compared to...  what's the mumber which is two before 5? In the former it often needs to be worked out from the original alphabetic order starting from a,b etc, while in the numbers example there's no need to start with zero.

To compound matters, not only are the floors vertically differentiated but the labeling also runs horizontally too.  So you have to read up and down and left and right.  With numbers that works a bit easier, for example double figures are more easily differentiated from single figures.  With letters maybe they could be "zones" rather than floors...rather like the Rohald Dahl's 'great glass elevator' in Charlie and the Chocolate factory where the lift goes left and right as well as up and down.

To compound matters, the use of letters has also required some post installation signage to make sense of it all.   A sign to identify the ground floor, which would more usually be 'G' or '0',   In this case the floor labelled 'G' is in fact the first floor.