[IxDA Discuss] ATM interaction design

[Jim Drew]

When I got my WaMu account, they said the PIN hjad to be 4 digits, no more and no less.  So presumably they *could* recognize four and accept.

Wells Fargo allows any length, so my PIN there is 10 digits.  Not my SSN, but rather I spell out words; with muscle memory, that's nearly as fast as a 4-digit PIN.  (But some systems -- a local Mac store and QFC supermarkets -- can't handle more than 8 digit PINs.  Weird.)

As for the German keypad, I would hope that the changing keys would be for context changes.  Making it impossible to type in your PIN the same way two times in a row isn't a trade-off for better security that I would like.  ATM that aren't convenient aren't something I want to use.

-- Jim Drew / CFM Designs
    cfmdesigns at earthlink.net

----- Original message -----
From: Mitchell Joe <mitch at mitchelljoe.com>

Some things I'd like to change about my local Washington Mutual ATM are:

-After I enter my 4-digit PIN, I have to press enter or some other  button. Seems like they should just know that when I'm done, I'm done. It seems like not that much bad could happen by not allowing  the user to cancel the incorrect 4 digits that they've just entered

-I saw this really cool keypad in Germany as I was entering my friend's apartment building--the keys were clear and plasticky and numbers on the keypad were generated digitally underneath and the positions of the numbers changed. This means that the top row wasn't  
always 1 2 3 and the second row wasn't always 4 5 6. They might have been 7 4 3 and 9 1 6. This (I assume) was so that people looking at you from far away watching where your fingers moved wouldn't be able to deduce your access code. I'd like one of those on my ATM. :)