Trumblog

Here is another of my old posts from a now defunct blog, originally posted 5/31/07.

I was in Minneapolis the other day visiting a client, and while my client rented a car, I tried out the rental car company’s new kiosks where you can print out directions to your destination. These kiosks should be a win, win, win. I get accurate directions customized to the detail that I want, the car rental company employees are more efficient because they don’t have to talk me through my route and millions of pink highlighters are saved from marking my path on a map that never had enough detail. But the kiosks don’t deliver on that promise. The reason is poor usability, which was bad enough that eventually an employee took pity on me and printed out the directions himself.

So what made the kiosk so difficult? In order to get directions of course you need to indicate where you are going and the interface made that near impossible. The home page provided a few most popular destinations, which was great, but when the hotel that I was staying at wasn’t included in that list the functionality broke down. Getting to a complete list of locations was unclear and the names of those locations were not in alphabetical order. To make things worse, the name of my hotel in their listing was different from the name of the hotel in my reservation, so I just hoped that I picked the right place. I’m 6’3” so I’m used to hunching over at ATMs, but the screen on this thing was at about waist level and angled to make reading and touching the screen really difficult. Finally, the directions were printed on thermal fax paper. I didn’t know they still made that stuff, but if you were wondering they do and the print quality has not improved.

I’m sure that when the interface was developed the designers felt like it was perfectly clear how to find a location. But when we design interfaces, navigation or tools we invariably get too close to the design or do not understand the audience well enough to avoid all the usability pitfalls. I know this because it happens to me too. The solution to this situation doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated usability testing, nor should it be; the biggest issues are uncovered by the first 5-10 test subjects which leaves you time to revise and retest to make sure that you actually fixed the issues that were uncovered. You just need to do the testing and then have the motivation to actually address those issues even when they conflict with previous decisions and impact the budget.

I hear all the time that my clients can’t afford usability testing, and in those cases I do it quickly on in-house subjects. But doesn’t this example illustrate why you can’t afford not to usability test and thereby resolve problems in advance? For this rental company, poor usability resulted in an opportunity for customer experience enhancement squandered and the significant investment in hardware and software wasted. Finally, the employee time savings that they probably hoped for was lost; especially when we returned the car and an employee was stationed at the kiosks while a line of customers waited to check-in.

What bad usability experiences have you had? Where have you noticed employees doing more work when customers can’t use new devices? Have you been guilty of skipping usability-testing? Have you learned your lesson?

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