Observations From The Field

Cashiers at a certain brand new cafeteria have touch-screen displays littered with buttons upon buttons. Which button is pressed the most? "Credit," of course. The button is so small that a cashier pokes it with the eraser end of a pencil. And she has to aim every single time. Multiply this by a couple of hundred clicks per day, and her day must be pretty exhausting.

An EMT worker answers a 9-1-1 call. To my excited comment about his rugged–looking tablet, he says, These things are a pain in the butt, all the while poking the screen with a stylus. To his credit, he didn’t want to use stronger language in front of my wife and daughter.

Seriously, you don’t want to make it difficult for an EMT worker. He/she has higher priorities that fighting the UI.

Two elderly ladies at a local gift shop, walk each other through screens of a "new system" to complete a simple credit card transaction, apologetically saying, We’re still learning this system.

In cases like these I keep my mouth shut about being a software developer because, clearly, the technology failed these people.

Part of the problem is that the interfaces are usually developed by twenty–something folks who are shielded from that filthy medium called the real world and who haven’t been tainted by experiences with this real world.

None of this is about technology. It’s all about how people function. It’s about their height, weight (heavier people have thicker fingers), strength (try holding one of those rugged tables with one hand), motor skills, degradation of eye sight with age, level of education (pay attention, copywriters!) and on and on.

It’s so simple to avoid these mistakes: you just have to observe real people using the technology and correct the design. That’s all there’s to it. Consider yourself lucky if all this is done under supervision of an information architect and/or a usability expert.