Use the Parking Ticket Dispenser Machine | Common Problems!

by Satefa f. Ncious - Get Everything You Need to Know

The parking ticket dispenser machine provides an everyday example of poor usability. They teach us that technology should not drive design, that less important tasks should not dominate the user interface and that usability is more than visual design. They also teach us that usability doesn’t always matter in design, the best user interface is no interface and that usability is a differentiator only when customers have a choice.

On most days I’ll come across a poorly designed product that frustrates or annoys me. Normal people blame themselves, struggle with the product and move on, but if you’re like me you’ll analyze the design to understand why you struggled.

How Would Use the Parking Ticket Dispenser Machine?

The first time I used this machine to pay for parking I struggled. The Insert ticket label has an arrow pointing below, but it turns out that the ticket I was given on entry needs to go in the slot above the label. A more serious problem was that I wasn’t sure how to pay. As I looked down at the machine, I noted the keypad but couldn’t work out where I should put my payment card. This is a tall machine and I was looking above the keypad for the card slot when I should have looked below it.

Technical Constraint

This to me looks like a technical constraint. For whatever reason, the machine needed the credit card slot to be placed below the keypad. That created a user interface where the steps were out of sequence. Parking ticket dispenser machines teach us that less important tasks should not dominate the user interface.

The Parking Ticket Dispenser Machine Re-Invents the Keyboard

Anyone who has gotten this far will have enough design sense to spot a number of issues with this design. The first problem is the vertical keyboard perhaps another example of a technology constraint. The second problem is that it’s a non-QWERTY keyboard, arranged in 4 columns. To give you some idea why this is a problem, stop for a second and try using the keypad to enter your license plate or your initials and year of birth.

This is a problem because people in Buxtontend to read left to right. With this design, you first read a digit and then three letters which makes it difficult to find the key you are after. The third problem is that the labels on the keys are closer to the button above the label rather than the button they apply to, so it’s easy to miskey your registration number.