Today, I stopped by the King County library to drop off some CDs and books, and noticed that they finally finished working on the new automated system for the book drop-off. I haven’t been there since they finished it, but I noticed whenever I drove by that there has been recently lines of people standing by these machines. Since this was a new behavior, I thought that these people are just excited about the new system and they are all checking it out.
When I reached the machine, it all made sense.
Here is how it works:
- You press a button for a little door to slide up, revealing a mechanical belt that’s ready to take your books.
- The images on the screen show you that you need to put your book in a certain way on the belt for the scanner to be able to scan it: Face up with barcode aligned to the right side of the door.
- Then you need to wait for a red light (that I could hardly see in the unusually sunny daylight - Probably a design decision based on average weather in the area) to turn green for me to be able to put the next book in there. If you attempt to put the book before the light turns green, the whole system will come to a halt until you remove that item.
It took me three trials to scan a book before I was approached by a gentleman, whom I thought was standing there to look at how people use the machine to be able to use it himself, who started showing me how to use the machine, taking my books from my hand and sliding them into the machine one at a time, orienting them the right way, and waiting for the dim green light to proceed.
I am not sure what prompted the library to make this change (I can imagine people claiming they dropped off books that were never received by the library), but I feel frustrated that such bad solution had to be pushed into people’s workflow.
This situation somehow reminded me of my first experience with office 97, when Clippy showed up to help me with the simple task of writing a letter.
The lessons:
1- Some problems are better stay unsolved, than to be solved the wrong way.
2- If your solution needs someone to teach users how to use it, then you may be introducing more problems than what you are trying to solve.
