Self Service Patience

Online ecom stores have been perfected since the internet boom optimized to the millisecond to keep you from abandoning your cart. Hundreds of funnels, countless A/B tests, all to make sure you don't get lost between "add to cart" and entering those 16 digits.

Ecom buying journeys? Documented, studied, obsessed over.

Self-checkouts? The complete opposite.

You're expected to haul your stuff to a kiosk, scan each item while hunting for barcodes, confirm it registered, then place it on a scale that judges whether you're a thief. The experience is so miserable that the only reasons people use it are to avoid long queues or because they're complete introverts.

So how do we make it slightly less terrible?

We'd done the basics: clear beep sounds when items scan, simple UI, big buttons, a human managing every 5 kiosks. Standard UI UX practices.

But complaints kept coming. Customers with 4-5+ items getting confused about what they'd scanned and what they hadn't.

So we did something different. We joined our colleagues on the shop floor greeting customers, bagging groceries, watching them struggle, waiting for that desperate glance before rushing over to help.

On the third day, a customer finally said it: "Why can't you just show product pictures? Why do I have to read tiny text to confirm what I scanned?"

Not exactly a eureka moment - that's UI 101. But retail POS machines last forever. Budget retailers run them until they die, swapping out spare parts for years. No upgrades, no new features.

Our client's system didn't have product images. The backend API never needed them in its entire decade of operation, so they were never built. We'd asked for them during testing but didn't push when we heard it's not available.

Developing a self service kiosk is less challenging than coordinating with Oracle's age old system to add images to an API built with Java in 2005.

If you've worked with Oracle, you know how "easy" it is to get things done and how "reasonable" their pricing is for a single endpoint modification. (Yes, that's sarcasm.)

After countless meetings and an email chain longer than a roll of receipt, we finally got the API to serve images.

So now customers could instantly see what they scanned. Complaints didn't stop, but at least customers didn't get stuck confused on the checkout.

Turns out, images really do speak louder than words - especially when those words are "ORGANIC BANANA 76365" in 15pt font.