What’s for lunch?
UX at the self-checkout.
Who’s hungry? You are. Trust me! And let’s say you’re at work right now. It’s lunchtime, and you only have a few minutes left on your lunch break so you decide to head to the grocery store. Shopping is often something that can take up a lot of time, but thankfully you only need to grab one or two things and head to the checkout. Waiting in long lines can be a real-time consumer in and of itself so you opt for the self-checkout.
“It will save me time,” you tell yourself. Or will it?
Self-checkout machines are indeed handy, but they’re not without faults. From errors with the weight machines to card reader glitches, these machines don’t always live up to their promises. Customers often choose self-checkout when they’re in a hurry, and even when they don’t run into these glitches, one of the biggest annoyances, oftentimes, is the confusing screens. Some stores have a better system than others, and today we’ll take a look at two of your options. Along the way, we will check for any usability pros and cons that we see by adhering to Jacob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. So, today you have a choice between your local Arizona grocery store Bashas or the big retailer, Walmart. Bashas happens to be a bit closer to your house, so you decide to go there.
Scenario 1
You run in, grab a salad, and seltzer water. You’re going to eat healthy today. You owe it to yourself. You get up to the front of the store and you see that there is a line for the cashier. You notice, off to your left, that the self-checkout is completely open. You walk up to the machine and are greeted by a welcome screen that instructs you to start scanning. So far, so good. The instructions for using the system are readily visible which happens to go along nicely with Heuristic #6: Recognition rather than recall.
You quickly scan your items (and for argument’s sake and to go along with the storyline, the screen reads salad and seltzer water. [Come on, have an imagination!]). You insert your debit card into the reader. Nothing happens. You notice the pay button with the total amount to be paid is situated to the bottom right of the screen. You tap it to continue.
Next, the system asks you if I would like to scan any coupons for your order. Normally you would think this is a great thing because it goes along with Heritistic #5: Error prevention which will help customers eliminate the mistake of forgetting to scan their eligible coupons. But you’re in a hurry afterall, so you tap on the No button.
What? Another pop-up window? This time it is asking you if you would like to donate to charity. You love using your resources to help others, but right now you are in a bit of a rush. You click the Skip button. Maybe you will consider donating next time when you have more time to think.
Ok. Now the system is asking you to enter your payment type. You’re getting closer to check out. So far this is taking a bit longer than you would have hoped. You are paying with your debit card, so you tap on Card. You can’t help but to notice that the system did provide you with a way to go back just in case you needed to double-check something before paying. That coincides with Heuristic #3: User control and freedom because it is allowing you to undo your response. Nice job, you think to yourself.
You are then instructed by the system to use the payment terminal to continue. You enter your card pin on the reader and wait to see what happens.
Finally! The machine informs you that it is printing your receipt.This goes along with Heuristic #1: Visibility of system status. The system is informing you of what it is doing so you don’t have to just stand and wonder what happens next. If only that could have been a quicker process, you think to yourself as you grab your receipt.
You head out the door, to the car, and back to the office (which is actually your house right now due to coronavirus) where you only have a few minutes left to eat before your next business meeting. Next time you think it might be better and faster to just order something with one of those online food ordering and delivery platforms that everyone has been talking so much about. Mmmmm. A cucumber. So refreshing. So crunchy. So tasty. Oh, there’s your boss now, time to answer that call. This salad will have to wait.
Scenario 2
Now, let’s take a look at this self-checkout process if you had gone to Walmart instead.
You walk up to the self-checkout machine and are greeted by a screen that instructs you to start scanning your items. Simple enough.
You scan your items (salad and seltzer water, remember?) and insert your debit card.
This time the system is happy. It automatically detects your card. No need to tap the pay button. This is going very smoothly.
You do your thing on the card reader, and voilà — processing.
The system informs you that is is printing your receipt. Done. Easy peasy. You are now free to grab your receipt and items, head out the door, and be on your way.
Walmart has the best self-checkout process that I have come across. It is fast, simple, and extremely intuitive. It really puts the user first in this design. The checkout screen and the card reader communicate automatically with no input needed from the customer.
Bashas is helpful by asking for coupons and thoughtful for asking customers to donate to charity, but what I feel the majority of people enjoy the most about self-checkout is the speed. These extra steps add time to the customer’s transaction. The need to manually enter that you are paying with a card is also a pain point for me.
I much more prefer the checkout experience at Walmart as opposed to Bahas, and I believe you did to. It gave you a few extra moments to munch that salad. Which I hope you got to finally finish, by the way. Hope you didn’t work too hard and enjoyed the rest of your day!
You can head over to YouTube if you’d like to go on a field trip with me where I conducted a bit of a UX analysis on a few different self-checkout machines around town. And as always, thanks for reading.
