agile-ajax

A UXD Lesson from the Gas Station

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, January 17, 2008 @ 5:38 am

This past weekend I was up on Howell Mountain in Napa, tasting the ultra tasty wines there and taking in the gorgeous views. On the way back to SF, we stopped at a Shell gas station. It took me a good 20 minutes to gas up. Why? Lousy user experience. Let me explain.

This was a new, fancy pump. It had a TV up top, a 4"x6" LCD screen just below crotch level (I'm 6'4"), a numeric keypad with a credit card reader about a foot to the right, and three fuel selectors another foot above. It was about 11:30, and the sun was shining right at the LCD screen. First I thought the TV was saying something relevant about my fueling my car. The Doppler effect of several other TV's saying the same thing at slight offsets around the gas station was also a little disconcerting. I finally figured out that the TV was just polishing the Shell brand and flogging sitcoms (aren't the writers on strike?).

So now I had to bend double to see what the burned in LCD screen was
trying to tell me. It's really hard to differentiate between burn-in
and real text when the sun is beating on the screen. I had to try and
shield the screen with my hand. OK, move over a foot to the right,
double over and slide the card. OK, back over a foot, double over and
shield the screen. Nothing. Try it again. OK, something? OK, back over
a foot and enter my zip code. OK, over a foot, shield the screen. OK,
authorized. Up a foot, select the fuel. Now down two feet and pick up
the nozzle. Now fuel. Replace the nozzle and bend double and shield the
screen? OK? OK. Receipt? Receipt. Where the heck is the receipt thing?
Ah, there, below the keypad.

I actually missed my flight because of that nonsense.

What's
the lesson here? There are a ton of them. Like, don't make it hard for
your users to accomplish their tasks. The one that struck me the most,
however, was the importance of user research. In particular, observing
the user in their typical work environment. If the folks that designed
that filling station had bothered to do some field testing (in direct
sun-light), they wouldn't have made the mistakes they did.

This may seem obvious to us when we develop for a filling station or hand-held medical devices,
but it may seem less obvious when you are developing an RIA for the
web. After all, aren't these folks using the same browser and laptop as
you? Not so fast. In the case of the webapp, familiarity breeds
contempt. You have to consider how they accomplish their work in the
largest context that is practical.

What if your user has to use
one other web application to get their job done and, in fact, that job
involves judicious copying and pasting between those two apps? It would
probably be a good thing if your app could be resized down to half the
screen. What if the user was frequently interrupted during the course
of a task. What could you do that would make finding their place a
little easier?

So, don't take the webapp's user environment for
granted. They may be sitting at a desk, but their physical and
functional environment may be very different from yours. There is no
substitute for field observation.

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Comments: 2 so far

  1. Man, I’ve been on this kick lately. So much hardware and software I’m using is crap and it’s driving me crazy.

    Last night I had to pay a parking ticket and order checks.

    The parking ticket site had a simple UI, but it did the simple things wrong. For instance, it told me that I had to enter a 10 digit ticket number and that I should “try” to pad it with zeroes. I’d imagine that people using any normal programming language would able to code up a subroutine that does that about as quickly as it takes to write a paragraph telling users how to do it.

    The parking ticket site sent me to payflow, which is secure and reliable, but looks disreputable (no production values) and won’t accept credit card numbers with spaces or dashes.

    The site for ordering checks was designed by “old school” marketing people. It had a testimonial up front about how the ordering process made somebody “feel comfortable.” I had to click three times to find the order form… The third click took about a minute of thinking because it was a sidebar link and I was worried it was going to take me in circles.

    The ordering process itself was terrible. I tried to see if I could find some cool custom checks — all I could find was Superman checks and it wasn’t even clear what they cost. I finally went back to the initial screen where I could order the same checks I got last time.

    Along the way the site explained inarticulately that the order was going to be billed to my bank account — it read something like “ALL YOUR CASH IS BELONG TO US”.

    In the last week I’ve used several e-commerce sites that were easy to use… They adhere to an unwritten standard that some sites just don’t get.

    Comment by Masked Bandit, Thursday, January 17, 2008 @ 9:22 am

  2. A 20 minute delay caused you to miss your flight?

    Didn’t anyone ever tell you to get there 2 hours before the flight departs? :)

    Comment by Robert, Thursday, January 17, 2008 @ 10:04 am

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