Have you come across something in your daily adventures that makes you go, “What the F@#K?! Who the hell designed this?”. Well, yesterday a parking machine was such a thing?
Where’s The Freaking Attendant?
You’re driving to your destination and looking for a place to park. Of course there are a billion questions going on in your head. “Do I have to pay to park the car?” “Why isn’t there enough parking around here?” “Is that a spot?” “What time is it?” “Am I going to be late?” “I hope I have money on me?” “Crap I have to pay!” “Why did I take the car today?” “Again what am I doing here?” “Do I have enough time to grab a latte?”
The last you figure you have to think about is how to operate an automatic parking machine. It should be pretty simple.
- Determine cost per hour
- Insert method of payment (coins or credit card)
- Check duration
- Confirm payment
- Hit OK
- Pick up ticket
Well this particular machine had to make things a bit more complicated as you can see in Fig.1. First where do you begin here? If you said, “where you see step (1) stupid”, you’re wrong. The payment information is to the right and split between two panels and separated by the coin slot. Where you see step (1) provides a status of your order: date, time in, time out, and money provided. It gets better. Step (2), does not accept your cash or credit card. If you want to pay with coins of credit card you go to step (3). Step (2) has 4 buttons. There is a ‘check’ to accept your purchase, an ‘x’ to decline, and an ‘A’ and ‘B’ I haven’t gotten a clue about. Now onto step (3). You have a coin slot that smartly indicates what coins it accepts, a slot for you credit card (Visa or Mastercard please), and if you looking all the way at the bottom, yup it accepts bills too (only $5 bills). You ask what step (4) is about. It is actually pointing to the ticket slot. So I don’t forget, just above the bills slot (marked by the *) is the coin return if you decide to cancel. There is no return if you pay by bills.
If I had to hammer this into shape I would have reorganized this in the following fashion (Fig. 2)
- Provide brief instructions and pricing
- Provide means to accept payment
- Show status of purchase
- Allow me to accept or decline purchase
- Give me my freaking ticket
The funny thing, I had arrived at the parking lot at 3:54PM. In this lot, parking is enforced between 8 AM to 4PM. In the entire parking lot, the only indication was on the panel to the right. Screw paying for parking, I’ll take my chances.
