I recently read an essay by a guy who helped out an older gentleman who was having difficulty at the grocery store self-checkout. The author cogitated about the changes the older gentleman had likely seen in his life, and was sad on his behalf that the simple process of buying groceries should be so daunting for him.
I gotta say: I’m feeling the old guy here. I wouldn’t mind using self-checkout once in awhile, especially when I have just a couple of things, but the machines hate me and thwart me at every turn. Today, for example, I tried to buy some broccoli. Did I have the PLU? No I did not. Would I like the machine to look it up for me? Yes I would. “Please wait.” So I waited, and waited, and waited. The line behind me grew restive. Finally I gave up, collared my stuff, and was heading to the regular checkout line when the attendant accosted me. She explained, as if to a child, that I ought to look up the PLU in the little booklet placed up out of eyeshot. I asked the machine to look it up, I protested. She looked at me pityingly and said, “The machine has the wrong code in there and it gets messed up.”
This has been another edition of “How Not to Design User-Friendly Systems.”
Ah, irony
In a former lifetime I coded for a living, and was always getting into disagreements with folks who wanted to design for other coders. My take has always been make it easy on the end-users - they don’t think like coders, and we shouldn’t try and make them.
When I stopped coding for a living, one of the one-liners I used to dismiss the idle (not really interested in the answer) questioners was that I didn’t want to compete with a 20 something kid who wrote in three languages, lived off of Mountain Dew and the praises of their fellow programmers. The reality? I’m getting older, and slower to think through programming problems. I still don’t like systems that aren’t designed around the end-user experience.
That won’t make me a Luddite anytime soon, will it?
RickD335
November 30th, 2008
Actually the telepathy circuits that sense confusion and fear have been steadily improved, esp. with the call Homeland Security function when fear is detected ..and we all know what that means.
For RickD, do you have the wooden shoes…essential dress for sabotage.
les
November 30th, 2008
Les - naah. I gave up splinters for Lent
RickD335
November 30th, 2008
If hating self-checkout makes me a Luddite, then go ahead and hand me the sabots. And Rick, thanks for standing up for us poor beleaguered end-users — someday even the arrogant 20-somethings will meet with their own personal clue-by-four.
Satchel
November 30th, 2008
Satchel P, you’re welcome - but why do we have to wait so long on the clue-by-four? Oh, I forgot - they haven’t yet developed ears to hear
RickD335
November 30th, 2008