[IxDA Discuss] Primary interface

[Joel Eden]

Last year I taught an undergraduate HCI course, where student project teams
carried out user research and paper prototyping of design ideas; one of the
groups had an idea for making checkout easier at supermarkets, based on
putting RFID-like tags on all products so that the customer could just walk
out and the transaction would occur automatically.

Well of course after doing some user research, they learned a lot about the
implications of their design ideas. They observed and asked questions of
people using some of these self checkout systems at supermarkets, and got
some great info.

For example, they found that some elderly people on a budget really liked
using the self checkout systems because they could go as slow as they
wanted, looking at the price that came up for each item, allowing them to
compare that price to the expected/sale price; they said they couldn't do
this when a checkout employee is quickly scanning items. If the they later
found that the price was wrong for even one item, they would have to go wait
in line at the customer service counter, which really bothered them. Their
design idea of RFID-like tags did not make so much sense after getting this
user/use data (they would still end up at the customer service counter).

I thought it was really interesting that this project group had assumptions
about who the users of these self checkout systems were, and they had
actually stated that the elderly community would not like them, because it's
"new technology;" so it was great to see that a little bit of user research
helped them see where their assumptions were misleading.

Joel



On 10/24/06, Bernie Monette <monette at iaai.ca> wrote:
>
>
> The funny thing about these self checkouts is that they were planned to
> make
> the lines go faster-instead they tend to attract fussier people who go
> through everything painstakingly slow: double checking everything.
>
> In my case-I used the primary interface only to have a very nice lady show
> up and then verify my payment. I wondered why she couldn't do the checkout
> as well.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bernie
>