I’ll try not to make all of my posts about UI, but since that’s where we interact with products, that’s where we first find the flaws. A truly amazing UI is rare, a perfect one may not exist. But we can expect our UI’s to at least be usable and have been thoughtfully laid out by their creators.
And yet there are so many product that feel like they were never used by the people who built them, else how could they possibly have shipped a product so flawed? The first one I will present to you is the Wells Fargo ATM built by NCR:
Apologies for the bad photo. Taking a picture of the ATM inside a bank is frowned upon and this one has a privacy screen making it hard to get a clear photo. But can you see the problem here?
One of the features of these newer ATMs is that you can choose a mix of bill sizes. Gone are the days of paying rent in 20’s (we called them Yuppie Food Stamps in the 90’s). Now you can choose whatever mix you like! Oh, but there are some caveats.
For one, you can only take a maximum of 50 bills which I guess is a security measure but that really limits the number of small bills you can take if you’re trying to pull out your rent and WAM (Walkin’ Around Money) at the same time. Fine, that’s a rich-person issue and we can live with that.
But here’s the fatal flaw: this ATM features a full touch-screen interface. Any part of the screen can be a soft key of any kind at any time. If one of your flagship features is the bill mix, surely you would just throw up a number pad and let people input how many bills they’d like of each size, no? Of course not. Instead, NCR have decided to go with +/- buttons, meaning that if you want $200 in 5’s, you have to push that button 40 times. FOURTY TIMES. That would be annoying on an iPhone but this piece of equipment is using cheap hardware and a touchscreen that might be resistive instead of capacitive and so it is very slow. There is a good 1-2 second lag between each push so you are looking at around a minute and half of pushing the same button (which beeps audibly each time) while everyone in the bank hears you do it.
This is a nightmare of UI design and is indefensible. I’d love to hear from NCR how they arrived at this solution except that I wouldn’t. Luckily, after you’ve done the same transaction a few times the system remembers it and offers it to you again as a single shortcut soft key.
Which would be helpful except that it’s also kind of insulting because it proves they can do better and just chose not to. But you can with your products. Please do better.
