With social-distancing measures in place for the foreseeable future, queue management—our topic in Module D—is being recast as a health-and-wellness hero. “The design practices and software tools that line experts have been working on for years might become as common as the queues they manage”, writes The Atlantic (Oct.28, 2020).
Disney is thought to have invented the “switchback queue” (that snakes back and forth) during the 1964 World Fair in NYC. Guests stopped complaining about the long queues at the Disney attractions, even if the lines hadn’t actually gone down. Over the next decades, the company perfected the waiting experience with props and preshows designed to entertain but also distract its guests from the endless waiting. In 1999, Disney’s FastPass allowed guests to pick their battles by skipping lines that weren’t worth the wait. Ever since, having fewer people in queues and more roaming the park has been the name of the game.
Distractions give human minds pause. But designers and engineers still have not figured out how to vanquish long lines. In a pandemic, frivolous distractions won’t cut it. The people who waited for 5 hours today to cast a ballot don’t need distractions from the wait; they need measures that will keep them safe and, better yet, allow them to avoid waiting in the first place. (On average, people overestimate how long they’ve waited in a line by about 36% by the way. This means that the actual wait time, no matter how short, isn’t the main problem; it’s is how long people feel they’ve been waiting).
WaitTime, a creator of crowd-intelligence-software designed for stadiums, uses ceiling-mounted cameras, computer vision, and patented AI to interpret crowd conditions in real time, so published wait times are always up to date.
New fear of proximity could spell the end of the physical line. Eight months into the pandemic, make-do solutions such as tape markers and DIY signs are giving way to more deliberate strategies such as magnetic queuing grids, virtual lines, and timed-entry passes.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Why do queues depend on cultural/social habits?
- What measures can be used to force people to stand 6 feet apart?