Help. I'm rising and I can't get out.

What the failing interface is up with JW Marriott's new elevators? Holy confusion, ad man. Show up in Washington D.C. after a long evening of travel, make it past security and the front desk, who will question your government contractor status, and yes, you are confronted with The Miconic 10 Elevator Management System. In simple terms, this elevator has buttons on the outside -- in the lobby -- for your floor, and no buttons inside where you'd expect them.

We're sure mathematically this wondrous machine whisks people up to the 10th floor more quickly, but the user experience is totally counterintuitive. You have to punch in your floor number while standing outside the elevator doors in the lobby, look up, see which elevator gets "assigned" to you, and then walk inside the steel vault where no buttons will allow you to escape until you get to the designated floor. We recall an article in The New Yorker or WSJ somewhere explaining the math behind this, and how it reduces the average wait-and-travel time for optimal human transportation efficiency.

But damn. We felt like cattle in the chute, looking around bovinely, trying to figure out what all the bright lights meant. Is that my elevator over there? No there! Hey I'm in -- can I get out? And why are you putting a prod in the back of my skull?

Our point, marketers, is that in the constant push and pull, yin and yang, love-hate of efficiency vs. design, sometimes numbers don't win. Sometimes -- gasp -- design rules the day. And the Miconic 10 is a horrible design. In the consumer touchpoint of getting in a steel box at the end of the day at a hotel in a strange city, we just want to be in control.

We're especially curious about the ROI of such a system. If Marriott is investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovating perfectly good elevators, what is the return? Perhaps business travelers will say, man, I got to my floor 3 seconds faster. I'm never staying at Westin again.