User Experience of the Self Checkout

06Nov09

Self Checkout, what a fun if it just would be a SELF Checkout

Sometimes there is no way out, saturday, IKEA Hell.

After nearly kicking 2 lovely jovely couples that seem to have a romantic moment on a saturday afternoon in IKEA (for God’s sake, how is that possible?) and being distracted by stuff I really don’t want but my wife yes, we arrived at THE QUEUES.

THE QUEUES

And if I say queues, I mean mega queues. As a bit of a gadget freak I wanted to try their self checkouts. In the supermarkets they work OK if you don’t have a granny in front of you that is scared by every sound. (Got the hint UX designers….)

I must say that they are not too bad, rather cool actually. You can do a lot, cancel and have most of the options you have when interacting with a human being.

The Human Being

But there comes the problem! The Human Being. In this case an assistent that was there to help you and man, she screwed up big time. I tried to tell her in a friendly way that I knew how to do it, but I guess she wanted to show off her knowledge of the system and there we went.

So how did we end up? Having to queue again after having to endure a long queue of people staring and sighting while we were waiting for the assistent to make a mess.

Conclusion

Not too bad these self checkout. As long as they would be SELF Checkout!

PS. Saw that I am not the only one. Read the article at the BBC

Filed under: Interaction Design, Interaction Designer, User Experience, User Interface   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: User Experience, user experience design, User Interface, ux