Adam Korman — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:41:41 GMT

As an interaction designer and Wells Fargo customer—thank you! I have been complaining for years (as anyone who runs into me after I withdraw cash will tell you), that every time I use the ATM, I need to tell it which account I want to withdraw money from (or deposit money to). This might make sense if my ATM card were tied to multiple accounts, but it’s not—I just have the one account, so why introduce an entire step just to ask which account I want to work with?

Probably 95% of my interactions with the ATM involve withdrawing the same amount of cash from my account. Now all I have to do is enter my PIN, press one button and I’m done.

ATM design is one of those things that highlights for me the problematic path that a use case-driven methodology can lead to vs. taking a holistic approach to interaction design based on what people actually need and use a product for. It seems that every book I’ve read about use cases uses ATM systems in its examples for how to construct use cases, and the resulting UI and workflows are reflected in the painful, unnecessarily complex/confusing interfaces found out in the real world.

physical interface: Comments by Adam Korman