Maya on Interaction

The new self-checkout machines are all the rage at my neighbourhood Tesco. As in any sensible initiative to replace people with computers, Tesco tripled its human staff load for the occasion. Extra personnel scurry about to iron out kinks and liaise between customer and machine.

Kinks occur because the people at the till or cash register can do much more than follow procedures but self-checkout machines only follow procedures.

Take this procedure:
1. price an item
2. throw it in a bag

And take this situation:
I (driven by early-morning munchies so powerful that I forgot that I am too discriminating to buy croissants from Tesco) put two croissants in a single plastic bag. Since one had pecans in it and the other didn’t, they had different prices. I might have put each in a separate bag but I’m with Ben Bradshaw. (props to Mlle. dron)

At checkout time, the machine asked me to press the button which depicted my product and to indicate how many I wanted. The machine lost its grip on my experience after I priced the first croissant but placed both (since they were in the same bag) on the adjacent scale. After pricing the second, the machine told me to put it on the scale. This request wasn’t coherent because the croissant was there already.

Tesco’s human assistants could see that all was kosher but the machine was in a huff. The weight of my grocery pile had to increase in order for us to move forward. Muddling through, I tossed my keys on the scale. The machine was appeased and a Tesco staff member sanctioned the manoeuvre with a nod.

Still, the case of the mediocre croissant purchase raises a chilling truth: good user experience can’t be specified in a procedure. Users are quirky pecans. Their unaccountable tastes and hang-ups lead to scenarios that we could never anticipate much less optimise in advance. Designing an experience demands an eye to procedure but also a readiness to dive into action – in the midst of the experience - with wily workarounds and situation-specific solutions.