The confusing machine at the gate
There’s no life situation in which user experience is not paramount. And it is the user who defines the experience, not the engineer. As a particularly low-tech example, take the parking lot I parked in at lunch.
For four decades, this parking lot has been free. It’s in front of a popular Phoenix luxury shopping mall, Biltmore Fashion Park. Last year, for some ungodly reason, the mall ownership decided it had to begin charging for parking in the street front lot, perhaps to keep the people out who just hang out in the Paradise Bakery or the Mojo Yogurt and don’t shop in the fancy-pants stores.
So they put in a gate, and a kiosk, and a system by which when you enter the lot you have to take a yellow token and have it validated for two free hours of parking by the store or restaurant you visit .
Now I’m no stranger to parking garages, and this is a common practice. But you can make it easy for the user, or you can make it deadly. The best garage I’ve experienced lately is in San Francisco, near Moscone Center. You take a ticket, and you pay before you return to your car. There are banks of payment kiosks, all yellow, showing you where to pay and telling you how to pay. They are hard to miss, or misperceive.
In theory, it’s the same system as the little yellow tokens at Biltmore Fasion Park. Except you must have the little yellow token validated by the merchant, and people aren’t used to carrying around little yellow tokens. They ARE used to carrying around parking tickets to have them validated. It will take time for the mall, which caters to winter visitors, tourists, and older locals, to get used to this drill. Most people try desperately to avoid it.
To complicate things further, in order to install the gate in the lot at Biltmore, the property management had to change the traffic patterns dramatically, so there is only one way to get out of the lot. The directions are not clearly marked. Non-intuitive one way traffic arrows on the pavement lead to dead ends. As a result, while I was there three or four cars were circling the lot looking for the one road to the exit, and another three or four were lined up at the exit trying to figure out the system with the little yellow token. At lunch time, it was a real jam, and everyone kept ringing the bell for the attendant.
I asked the attendant whether she was getting enough user feedback to advise her superiors to make changes in the system to make it more user friendly and friction free. She looked at me as though I were a child: “there’s nothing wrong with the system, it’s just that people don’t read the signs.” Right. That’s like the engineer saying “Read the F**king Manual” about a piece of software. It ain’t gonna happen, and besides, WE are the customer. We are paying. We deserve at least a decent customer experience.
I didn’t bother going into it with her further. Clearly, although the Apple store is in this mall, she had never been there. She didn’t understand that it is possible to produce intuitive system in which manuals and signs are not needed, because the system or design plays off common knowledge or the user’s previous experience, and there is a shared understanding. Think iPad.
Other things that could be fixed:
The single sign showing the exit is posted under a tree, and is very difficult to find.
A kiosk outside the lot confuses people about whether to pay there, or in their cars at the exit.
The design of the entire operation is not friendly.
The attendant, who is naturally annoyed at having to run out repeatedly from elsewhere in the center, always betrays her annoyance and clearly thinks the confusion in the customer’s shortcoming.
At some point, Biltmore Fashion Park will examine its traffic and decide its sales are off. Have them call me when that happens. And give that attendant some uppers in the mean time.
