(08-30-2019, 02:09 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(08-30-2019, 11:20 AM)ijmorlan Wrote: That’s taking it way too far. Replace “is” with “may be” or even “is often” and you have something.
People using technology have to take some responsibility for their use of it. An extreme example is something like a chainsaw; no matter how many idiots kill themselves by dropping trees on themselves, that isn’t a problem with the chainsaw design. Now of course this is a fare card interface, not a chainsaw, and it needs to be super-simple and able to be used without significant training. But if it read cards at a distance, it might read a card you didn’t mean to present, which would be another problem. So the “it’s faulty implementation” fix (i.e., make it read at a larger distance) for the problem of “people don’t actually touch their cards to the reader” isn’t necessarily acceptable.
No, it really isn't, at least not in context. The target user should be able to use software with the expected level of experience. For a transit terminal, that experience is zero and the target user is everyone.
If users are routinely making mistakes when using it, the designer/developer is at fault 100%...
Don Norman makes this argument, and is now has his namesake used to describe doors which people routinely walk into, basically, if people walk into your door, you designed a bad door, a transit fare card should be similarly easy to use.
Right, but those doors are different from the other doors with which people don’t have a problem.
With the card reader, it’s not clear it can be fixed by changing the way it reads, since it’s also bad for it to read from too big a distance. As far as I can tell, what is needed is a way to get people to realize their card needs to be right up close, almost touching.
The current level of trouble indicates something wrong with something, probably the signage and/or shape (rather than the actual read distance). It’s hard to say what level of trouble is OK. Clearly at some point it’s not worth anybody’s time to think about improvements. If 1/1000000 of the people who encounter the reader can’t figure it out, that will be a lower fraction than run into other problems like it being broken entirely.