In an undisclosed city at an undisclosed company the catering contract ended and the company set out finding a new supplier. As the new year started so did the new catering company. This is a tale of how a perceived cost cutting measure turned out to cause massive frustration and costing more.
The old system
In the previous system the primary principle was that the personel themselves entered the products they wished to purchase through the use of a barcode scanner, thus eliminating the need for service personel.
However, as with all systems where people are required to self report their purchases, conscientiousness is a limiting factor.
The system certainly wasn't without it's share of usability issues since some of the barcode scanners wouldn't work unless being held at precisely the right angle. Another issue with the system was that many products lacked barcodes and required the user to scan a barcode next to a picture on a big board. Sometimes there wasn't even a picture but just a name.
It might sound complex but users quickly picked up speed using the system.
The new system
Therefore it came as quite a surprise to what extent the new system failed to live up to its predecessor when the the new system was introduced at the beginning of 2011.
Gone were the barcode scanners and instead they had been replaced with a touchscreen with a number of categories which each held a number of items. These categories and the names of the items seemed to stem from some internal record keeping or backend software. For instance "soup" was to be found under "Start" whereas chocolate sprinkles (which the Dutch like to put on their sandwiches) was sorted under "Meats & Cheese". Other items would be spread out among the categories with certain flavours of items only being available from within certain categories. A vegetable croquette was thusly tucked away under "Start" whereas other kinds of croquette would be considered a kind of snack. Some items were given a colour coding with dubious results such as "Green meat". Never mind the use of green and red as the only means to distinguish between categories.
The visibility of system status was poor due to the currently selected menu item disappearing when selected. The system also caused high cognitive load since the principle of "recognition rather than recall" was disregarded. Most of the items in the system looked nothing like their real life counterpart.
No use what so ever was made of the laws of gestalt (visual grouping) and the order of items within each category was completely random. It was therefore not possible to scan for a certain type of item and instead the user was forced to read the labeling for each item until the right item was found.
The system was only available in English despite a large number of its users being Dutch. This might not sound as such a big deal unless you consider that there are quite a large number of items that are more or less specific to the Netherlands. Items such as Hagelslag (the sprinkles mentioned earlier), broodje croquette (a fried ragout roll in a bread) and broodje haring (a herring in a hot dog bun) can be translated but would seem strange to someone not familiar with the Dutch cuisine.
Last but not least the checkout process only allowed you to delete one item. If you had done two mistakes in a row you would be greeted with a message saying "Error cannot void!" and the only solution was to start over from the beginning.
Everybody suffers
Before the system was even launched an email was sent out to all employees in the company telling them to be patient with long queues initially as the people familiarized themselves with the new system. Change management is a tricky business and there is almost always an initial drop in performance when a new system is rolled out. But weeks passed and the queues did not subside but a number of other things did happened:
1, Extra personel was added to alleviate users in distress.
2, One of the checkout machines was replaced with a cashier to aid users new to the system or guests visiting (which in itself is contrary to the business goal of using the system to begin with).
3, An extra board was added next to each machine with pictures of the items and where to find them in the system.
4, All users were invited to a session to ask questions about the new system
5, All users were invited to a second session dubbed "How to pay: walk-through" to get training on how to use the new system.
When talking to users of the system it became clear that people began making their own lunch or started only buying a set of items that they knew how to find thus impacting the financial gain for the catering company and reducing the satisfaction a user would get from their lunch.
Conclusion
So my concluding point is this: instead of investing in usability research during development the catering company is forced to invest heavily in after sales support going so far as providing training for a system which was going to reduce costs and shorten the lines. Something as simple as doing discount usability testing with a few users would have nipped many of the problems listed above in the bud and saved the catering company a lot of money down the road.
The mantra is simple: Research, Design, Test and Repeat!
