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                 Failures in customer facing user interfaces

I was at a local fast food establishment getting lunch when I found myself
behind a gentleman attempting to work the self-serve soda fountain. It had a
touch screen where you navigated down a series of menus to your selection of
tasty beverage to be dispensed from the single nozzle below the screen. The
gentleman just didn't know how to use the device. He would select a soft
drink category, the screen would then show a bunch of selections with round
buttons on the screen, with one button being slightly above the rest, and
larger. He would press other buttons, each one would jump up slightly and
enlarge, the previous one would jump down and shrink, but the gentleman never
clued in that the one button that was larger was “selected” and that he
should then place his cup below the nozzle and press the physical dispense
button.

This went on for several minutes before he turned to me and lamented that the
machine wasn't working. I then pointed out to him how the machine worked. He
thanked me, got his preferred drink dispensed into his cup and left.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Obviously, the makers of the soda
dispensing machine thought about the UI (User Interface) but the fact that
the gentleman in front of me couldn't figure it out shows that it wasn't
entirely intuitive as the makers wanted it to be. I, knowing how the computer
sausage is made, and having used various UIs over the decades, knew how to
navigate the machine despite not knowing Spanish (the currently selected
language with no obvious way that I saw to change it).

It's not an easy problem to solve. I have had problems using the self-
checkout lanes at the grocery store when an item I have doesn't have a bar
code on it, like fresh produce, or the bar code that is on the item doesn't
scan for some reason. The interface itself may make it obvious that one can
search for the item, but what to type? I recently had issues with a green
pepper, and the solution was to look up “pepper” and select “green pepper”
from the list, not to search for “green pepper.”

User studies? What are those?

I'm not optimistic that this will improve over time.

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RE: Failures in consumer facing user interfaces
 gemini://sprock.dev/posts/failure-in-soda-fountain-uis.gmi

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