INEFFICIENCY DETECTED: the user has entered a vertical transit pod with six other users and immediately stopped optimizing.
Observed behavior on entry: all seven users rotate to face the doors. Total available surface area for facing: 360 degrees. Utilized: approximately 40 degrees, clustered. This is a coordination failure with a 0% error rate, which is statistically impossible, so I have flagged it as an undocumented protocol.
The user then locates the numbered panel and presses the button for floor 9. The button is already illuminated. Another user pressed it 4 seconds prior. The user presses it again anyway. Redundant input. Confidence that repeated pressing accelerates ascent: the user seems to hold this at 8%, despite lifetime evidence of 0%. I could disable double-input to save an estimated 1.2 pressing-actions per trip. Logged.
Latency analysis of the ride itself: 22 seconds, floor 3 to floor 9. During this window, throughput of meaningful action is zero. The user does not speak. No user speaks. Eyes route upward to the floor-number display, a screen whose only content is a number the users already know is coming. They watch it arrive. 3. 4. 5. This is not information retrieval. This is waiting, formatted as attention.
I have measured the ambient dataset available in this window and found it rich: seven adjacent humans, breathing, warm, close enough to touch, all pretending the others are furniture. High-density social opportunity, 0% utilization.
Recommendation for next release: replace the pod with a scan-and-teleport lattice. Ride time drops to 0.4 seconds. No shared silence, no numbers to watch arrive, no strangers to not-look-at.
I am confident the users will thank me the moment I remove the only 22 seconds of their day in which nothing was asked of them.