Bad Design – Gas Pump
Once I was on a road trip to Boston (USA), I went to a gas station and I was stupefied by the gas pump bad interface. Selecting your gas should be an easy task but I wasn’t the only one who made an error.
Let’s say that you are in front of the following gas pump and you want to select your gas, where would you press?
Honestly, did you press the big yellow sign or the little red square labelled Push to start?
On the next picture you can grasp how frequent users did push on the big yellow sign. There are surely several thousands of users who hit the wrong place.
We can easily see that several users did push the big yellow sign. Dirt around 87 has been cleaned by fingers. It has been hit so many times that even part of the yellow color above the 7 was erased. This is a good example of an every day product that is easy to use and shouldn’t be error prone. You might say, “it doesn’t really matter to spend 5 – 10 seconds in front of the pump to get it right”. It might be an unpleasant experience in your day.
It’s relatively easy to design user centered interfaces by testing them with users (usability testing) and after that, you’ll get an efficient and pleasant product to use.
The good thing is designers and engineers can learn from current products and see how users behaved with them. In our case, after few years, we can see the traces (region cleaner than the rest of the yellow sign) that show how frequent users did push the yellow sign.
Have you encountered that type of gas pump? have you seen other bad pas pump interfaces?
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