Ever noticed how rude and dumb some of the machines around us are?
There are 2 cases in point:
Recently on my trip to Auckland, I was using a vending machine to get a ticket to go up the big tower there. Using the machine I had to navigate through a series of inane questions, along the lines of: Do you want to buy a ticket? Yes. How do you want to pay for that? Cash. Do you want to use notes or coins? Coins. I was over it before I’d started. Why couldn’t it just response to whether I swiped my card, feed notes into the slot or inserted coins? I think it could have answered its own questions. To make matters worse, when it finally spat out the ticket, it literally did just that – the ticket came out of a low positioned slot and dropped to the ground. You’d sack such a dumb and rude kiosk operator after a day.
95% of the time I go to my Westpac ATM I get out either $80 or $130. It’s actually all about getting enough $20 notes so I don’t have to manage $50 notes. But every time I use the machine, it offers me the standard “shortcuts” to the standard withdrawal amounts – $20, $50, $100, etc. If I was going into a branch and dealing with the same teller day after day, pretty soon they would say “Hey Brett – what’s it going to be today? $80 or $130? or something else?”. And to cap it off, when it is pushing out the money, “Michelle”, the humanising woman on the screen cheerily says “Here’s your money and receipt if you asked for one”. Poor Michelle with the short-term memory problem – just moments before I’d told her I didn’t want a receipt.
Why do we accept behaviour from machines that we won’t from people?
To put it another way: As we are designing interfaces, it’s a great test to ask “If this was a person, it is being smart, friendly and polite?”.
