Step Away From The Technology!

I've written about this before in a post where I discussed the annoying nature of voice recognition systems. In general the idea is that technology can not solve everything, and relying on it too heavily in situations where it is simply not up to the task can be expensive and detrimental to your business.

I wanted to mention this again because I came across another instance of it, at a Home Depot store. They have a checkout system there that lets you check out "quickly" by scanning the items yourself with the help of a touch-screen. The problem is that the system is being asked to do more than the machine is really capable of doing. To make matters worse the UI is crap, to the point that I, as a software engineer who is very comfortable with computers, found myself asking an employee for help. Between the three of us (my girlfriend, the employee, and myself), it took about five times longer to get through this process than it would have if the employee had just scanned the items.

Even if the UI had not been total crap, the system was being asked to do more than can be expected of it from these days. It tries to keep track of what you are buying by asking you to put it down on the "Shopping Bag Area". Of course I could probably just put something else down to try and cheat the system, so I am not sure what it is trying to accomplish, but it actually made the experience worse when my girlfriend accidentally put down her hot apple cider on the "Shopping Bag Area". It freaked out saying there was an extra item. When we removed the cider the system didn't pick up the change right away and continued to complain. So we removed another item just to get it to shut up, but then it finally recognized both changes and complained that we had removed too many items. After a few frustrating iterations of this we were able to get the machine to let us check out, but only because I just timed it right and hit the checkout button before it could complain (a skill you can develop easily if you ever get into an infinite javascript loop with an alert in it).

Maybe it was just a bad experience on my part, but this just seemed to me like the perfect example where the technology is just not there yet and trying to force it to do too much is going to cost more and make the customer's experience much worse...