[IxDA Discuss] ATM interaction design

[Michael Micheletti]

A couple weeks ago, I fed my card into a BECU machine, entered my PIN, asked
it to give me some money, and then waited for several increasingly anxious
minutes while _nothing_ happened. It had my card, the controls were
unresponsive, there was no phone number to call, and I was getting freaked
out. "What if it doesn't give my card back to me, but it gives it back to
somebody else?" "Can the next guy to visit the machine transfer all my money
to their account?" etc. Total irrational machine-fear paranoia time.

Long minutes later, my card came back to me and the machine posted a
nastygram something like "This machine is not operational, service has been
notified." A bit of an anticlimax given the whole thumpa-thumpa nervous
nail-biting experience that preceded. I was later brave enough to ask a
different machine (successfully) for lunch money.

A responsive user interface and status indication would have been
reassuring. A card swipe would have eliminated the "somebody else ends up
with my card" worry at least.

Michael Micheletti

On 4/20/07, pauric <radiorental at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jon "I like the machines that are only a card swipe, so the
> card is never in the machine. No chance of leaving it behind when it
> never leaves your hand."
>