Speaking as a technically-oriented software engineer who’s built some pretty crappy interfaces in my day, it continues to surprise me that people build interfaces without thinking through how people will use them.
For example, Panera Bread has a “you pick two” order, where you can get two half-orders of a sandwich, salad or soup, along with a side like bread, chips or fruit. One would naturally think that the interface where the cashiers would enter your order would allow you to specify the two halves, then the side. Logical, yes?
But if you order that way, the cashiers often seem a little thrown off. And if you give your order slowly – rather than just rattle it off because you’ve probably ordered it a thousand times at this point – they’ll ask a stereotyped series of questions which I impute are being presented in this order by the interface:
- (1) Is this for here or to go?
- (2) What do you want on your You Pick Two?
- (3) Would you like anything to drink?
- (4) What do you want as your side?
Now, note that a You Pick Two doesn’t come with a drink (like Captain D’s or Chic-Fil-A’s value meals). So the interface. The drink isn’t part of the You Pick Two order. Yet if you try to specify your side, the cashiers will have to do a little fiddling in the interface. It’s easier just to present information in the order above:
“(1) This is for here. (2) I’d like a You Pick Two, with (2a) a Bacon Turkey Bravo and (2b) a Strawberry Poppyseed (2b1) with Chicken Salad. (3) I’ll take a large beverage. (4) Bread as the side. (5) [wait 5 seconds] I don’t need the cup – I already have a to-go cup, I just need to pay for the drink.”
Note that in (2b1), even though the Strawberry Poppyseed salad normally has chicken on it, if you don’t specifically emphasize the fact that it has chicken, sometimes they’ll ask if you want to leave it off, and in (5) you have to wait 5 seconds for them to complete the order, or they may delete the drink.
[Why insist on paying for the drink? Because I eat out a lot, and use insulated to-go cups to save on the waste of buying and discarding a cup once or twice a day. But once I was at Panera in Campbell and the Panera district manager complained to me that if I was using a to-go mug I should be paying for my drink. I insisted that I did and showed my receipt … and found the cashier had taken the drink off the order without telling me. The manager took my word for it, but it made me feel both embarrassed and unwelcome, which is not why I go out to eat – I have work to do, damn it, and need to do my reading in a place where I can’t be distracted by doing laundry or whatever – so I always insist on paying for my drink.]
Anyhoo, weirdness of interfaces can be found everywhere. Just today, I was trying to log into a website, and the website authors had put the login button in a popup that disappeared when you hovered over it. Presumably it was meant to go away if you didn’t click on it, but the actual effect was, you couldn’t log in on the company’s home page and had to hunt through pages to find a login button that was a real button.
As another example, the interface for AT&T’s voicemail in my area recently changed. Instead of saying “end of message” and giving you an opportunity to delete a message, it just goes straight to “saving message”, which means if you got a spam call which hung up rapidly – and silently – there’s no way to delete the message before it gets saved. If you try, it will delete the next message in your messages. So this “update” is strictly worse than the previous interface, making you hear each message a minimum of twice.
So, I guess what I’m trying to say here is, don’t fall in love with your new interface before thinking through – and testing out – how people will actually use it, OR, as we used to say back in my day:
Old man rants at cloud.
-the centaur
