By Peter Cochrane, 9 November 2005 11:10
COMMENT
Written at a firm in the Cambridge UK Science Park, and dispatched from a free domestic Wi-Fi network in Colyton, Devon
Late last night I checked into yet another hotel with a front desk from hell. I stood there mesmerised as the receptionist tapped away at the keyboard between asking me questions about my reservation, home address, company, wake-up call, newspaper etc, and swiping my credit and loyalty card. It was impressive! A total of 148 keystrokes were required before I got a plastic key and a room allocated.
This morning, in the same hotel, I purchased two coffees, a croissant, a banana and a packet of biscuits for a mere 48 keystrokes. Last week I may have witnessed a world record attempt for the Electronic Point of Sale (Epos) keystroke inefficiency cup. All I wanted was a cup of coffee but it cost 48 keystrokes - for a cash purchase! And to cap it all I was handed an individually printed A5 receipt on good quality paper.
At this point I have to hold my hand up and say that whilst I am not an obsessive counter, I do find myself spotting patterns in brickwork, tiles, roof beams, repetitive human activities and so on. I also sit in restaurants, bars and shops and estimate their yearly turnover, operating costs and margins. I'm not sure why but I just do. Counting keystrokes at every Epos was not on my pastime agenda two years ago but now it is! We seem to be going backwards in time, becoming stupidly more inefficient, wasting the time and lives of operatives and customers.
Swiping my credit and loyalty card should be sufficient. Moreover, when I have stayed in the same hotel, or used the same coffee shop time and time again, it should all be automatic. Just four or five keystrokes should do it! What are the designers of these Epos systems thinking of? Did they ever work on a check-in desk or serve coffee? If only! This is really dumb stuff.
Bluntly, I can't figure out where all those keystrokes came from. I've tried counting out the letters in the words 'coffee', 'croissant', 'banana', 'biscuits' etc but no matter what I do I just cannot get to 48 keystrokes. Hopefully it will all get fixed when we move to payment by mobile phone - unless of course we are expected to do the keying! When I was a kid it was so much more efficient, easier and user-friendly.
Comments
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1. anonymous
On a vaguely related subject, I've noticed that the selection interface on office coffee machines continues to frustrate through inflexible design. Some give you change regardless of whether you wish to buy more than one cup, some refuse to give change until they have entirely dispensed, some insist you take a cup out and replace it again a few seconds later (whether plastic or a mug) even after dispensing half a cup of Espresso that they have forgotten about. Some insist you qualify the milk & sugar levels, even on "black without"!
2. Bitter Consultant
Two points: count the clicks required to read existing comments and then leave a comment on this blog! Why not just list all comments below the post in their entirety?
Second point - you're exactly right about the inefficiency of retail POS entry. Why would Starbucks' and other food eateries require a novella for a simple purchase??? Don't these people get that their profitability is tied to through-put??? Record the sale with a push of a button and make change. That's it! The absurdity of carpal tunnel inflicted baristas really seems...well, absurd!
3. Aaron Rothschild
Duh! The extra strokes come from when they are spelling "banana" and they mistype using the on-screen, too small-for-any-fingers, alphabetic order keyboard. The extra strokes are for using 'Backspace'....
4. Simon Allen
All shops including 'convenience'(!) want you to hand over the single chocholate bar or newspaper so that they can scan the bar-code. If there was a secondary scanner at the front of the desk, then the customer could scan faster (if they wanted to) and no goods would have to be handed back and forth across a (often) high and narrow counter.
No, what a silly idea ...
5. Martin Lukes
And your point is?
How on earth do you think CRM systems would sell if there was anything even remotely like an intelligent interface between customer and seller? If people on tills took any interest whatsoever in why their wages get paid? If they knew any of the prices, or bothered to learn any of them?
Do you want full employment, or what? Frankly, this Luddite approach to time-wasting and aggravation sounds pretty close to communism to me (I think...)
6. anonymous
The reason this situation continues to decline is because WE tolerate it.
New and 'advanced' ERP systems seem to take many more user keystrokes to operate than the 'out-dated' ones they replace. We, the customers, seem to accept this in the name of progress. What ever happened to the ergonomic design criteria which were once so important?