08-30-2019, 05:12 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-31-2019, 08:04 AM by danbrotherston.)
(08-30-2019, 04:00 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(08-30-2019, 02:09 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: No, it really isn't, at least not in context. The target user should be able to use software with the expected level of experience. For a transit terminal, that experience is zero and the target user is everyone.
If users are routinely making mistakes when using it, the designer/developer is at fault 100%...
Don Norman makes this argument, and is now has his namesake used to describe doors which people routinely walk into, basically, if people walk into your door, you designed a bad door, a transit fare card should be similarly easy to use.
Right, but those doors are different from the other doors with which people don’t have a problem.
With the card reader, it’s not clear it can be fixed by changing the way it reads, since it’s also bad for it to read from too big a distance. As far as I can tell, what is needed is a way to get people to realize their card needs to be right up close, almost touching.
The current level of trouble indicates something wrong with something, probably the signage and/or shape (rather than the actual read distance). It’s hard to say what level of trouble is OK. Clearly at some point it’s not worth anybody’s time to think about improvements. If 1/1000000 of the people who encounter the reader can’t figure it out, that will be a lower fraction than run into other problems like it being broken entirely.
I never said that the only solution is to make it read from a distance, but the current usage pattern is broken. We have identical cards used in store for tap payment that work reliable. Regardless of the combination of technical solutions, better instructions (having a card holder), more clear affordances (the tap pad is far away from where you are working when you're using the machine, making it less likely people will tap correctly), these are all part of the design, and the designers who made a design which breaks much of the time when we have tap cards that work reliably elsewhere means the designers failed to build a good design.
Yes, if we had an issue with only 1/1,000,000 riders, I wouldn't call the design faulty, because that means it almost always works...not "often" works. If something often works, it often doesn't too.