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From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: Yucky ATM interfaces (WAS Re: Touchscreens)
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.042048.2749@Think.COM>
Date: 20 Jun 91 04:20:48 GMT
References: <1991Jun17.062203.1381@sq.sq.com> <80373@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1991Jun19.233836.19040@ohmeda.com>
Sender: news@Think.COM
Reply-To: barmar@think.com
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Lines: 33

In article <1991Jun19.233836.19040@ohmeda.com> ccrowley@ohmeda.com (Chris Crowley) writes:
>The yucky-est thing about the ATM machines is that some ask:
>"are you done with your transaction?"
>and some ask:
>"do you have other transactions?"

My ATM (BayBank, in Massachusetts) is generally pretty good (IMHO), except
for this part.  It asks:

	Do you want another transaction?

and then offers three choices:

	Yes, I want another transaction.

	No, please return card and a receipt.

	Yes, please return card and a receipt with account balances.

I like the third option of getting the account balances included on the
receipt, but the "Yes" confused me quite a bit for a while.  Internally, it
involves a transaction (the ATM has to query the bank computer), but it
ends the user's session just like the second option.

What confuses me more about it is that the ATM used to preface the third
option with "No", and they *changed* it at some point.  This implies that
someone made a conscious decision that "Yes" is better than "No" for this
choice, and it wasn't just an inadvertant error.
-- 
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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