Technologists Deliberately Fail Tests

In PetSmart at the cash register, on the customer credit card terminal, someone has taped on, next to the keyboard, large lettering that says, YES with an arrow pointing to the left, and another message that says, NO, with an arrow pointing to the right.

At the Chevron station next to the McDonald’s in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, someone has taped 3 x 5 index cards onto each pump, next to the credit card slot. In small black handwriting, each card instructs, “Insert card with strip at top and ...”

In a meeting regarding a complex form that “end-users” (regular people) must complete, the discussion about programming comes to a dead stop when I ask, “What wording are we going to use to tell people they have to enter a numerical amount in dollars and cents?” The incredibly bright and capable programmers, dealing with a remarkably complicated task of making the form produce data that can be imported into a complex program, stop and glare at me in a way that suggests I’m rude, or foolish.

They pronounce, “If they don’t enter an acceptable dollar amount, they’ll be told to do so.” This approach will produce frustration and failure. We can’t tape 3 x 5 index cards onto monitors throughout the United States, so it seems we must give great directions on screen.

All three of these lapses are preventable, though the causes may be different. First, about those terminals in PetSmart (or Block Buster or....). It is possible that time-to-market and/or cost efficiencies pushed the manufacturers into selling a problematic product. The production process should have included adequate field testing before going into full production. At PetSmart, perhaps the problem is that the LED terminal itself is not easy enough to read.

At first, Chevron’s lapse at the pump is more puzzling. Chevron has pockets deep enough to pay for testing before extraordinarily expensive gas pumps replace older models across the nation. The pumps feature only visual communication, an icon of the card, properly oriented. The problem here is that while many people are highly visual, many are highly verbal. Written instructions are needed. So the 3 x 5 cards get taped onto the pumps.

Are engineers ignorant about communication principles? Must we imagine that the engineering team that produced the pump design looked at the model and said, “Yup, that makes sense to us, so it should work for 50 million people just fine.”

A communication expert might want to remind us that, aside from the visual and verbal, some folks people are better communicated to with sound, touch, or (?) smell.. True, the pump could d tell people what to do, “Welcome to Chevron. Please insert your credit card with the magnetic strip...” After all, some stations now pipe audio commercials to us, “Come inside and get a 6 Pack of Pepsi for only...”

A better explanation about why technology fails to communicate is this: customer service is not driving the technology in the first place. Perhaps, for example, the primary purpose of that pump is not to save us a stroll into the station to pay. The core purpose is to reduce staffing costs.

In short, we may be thinking that the technologists just ran out of gas right at the critical juncture of making the gas pump easy to use. But probably they just looked at each other and said, “If the guy wants gas bad enough, he’ll keep sticking his card in there until he gets it right. Or he can walk in and pay. We don’t care.”

The key phrase here is, “bad enough.” If it’s gas we’re pumping, the engineers may be right. If it’s a Website requiring a customer to decipher a form in order to pay up, bad communication can result in lost customers, lost sales. We must care about that.

Key questions to ask when the decision gets made.about how much effort goes into communicating how a technology works: Who cares? Who gets to vote? What’s at stake?

This article first appeared as a column written by Dave Tedlock, NetOutcomes' president, for Tucson Business Edge, a monthly magazine published by the daily newspaper, the Tucson Citizen.