Had my first go at one of those do-it-yourself grocery store check-outs the other day, and the experience was so frustrating that I may never bother with them again. Kept getting messages, telling me to rescan the item or put it in my shopping bag. But the system couldn’t tell me what my error was and there was no one around to steer me in the right direction. Two or three times it looked like the whole thing was going to crash and I would have to take all my stuff to a regular cashier, wasting a good fifteen minutes of my time.
The whole experience was like a bad IT application roll-out – not enough training for the user and little to no tech support for him while he’s trying to familiarize himself with the technology. And in the end, you wind up with a frustrated employee looking for ways to work around the system.
After decades of introducing users to technology, seems like many organizations haven’t learned a thing when it comes to rolling this stuff out. To my mind, it should start with good user training, augmented by