ATM interface improvement, or "Yo no hablo español"

Posted on Oct 25, 2009 in Design, IT | 4 comments

Far be it from me to complain about banking these days, since it’s pretty darn easy. As a kid, I used to walk a block to the local branch and deposit my change once a week. These days, years go by without me setting foot inside a bank thanks to automatic deposit, online banking, and of course the ubiquitous ATM.

ATMs certainly revolutionized banking for both the banks (reduced manpower costs and increased fees) and customers (ease and availability of banking and if you’re not careful, increased fees). I’m a big fan of ATMs in general and US Bank in particular, but there is one glaring user experience oversight that I sure wish they’d correct: my language preference.

This is an image of the initial screen on my US Bank ATM. I see it every time I use an ATM—every time. “What’s the big deal? Man, you like to complain about everything, don’t you?” I can already hear you say. While it’s certainly true that a single click or button press is not a gravely important issue, it is worth discussing from a user-experience standpoint. Why? Two reasons:

1. It affects every user of the system – I may be the one writing about it, but I’m certainly not the only one who’s annoyed by it. It’s a few seconds wasted with each transaction, multiplied by dozens or even hundreds of transactions per ATM per day. That’s a significant amount of wasted time.
2. It’s completely correctable – I can think of at least three ways this issue could be resolved that shouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement (though I realize the true complexity of a system might not obvious to its end users).

For these two reasons alone US Bank should investigate resolving this issue. (And while they’re at it, they could do the same with the “Do you want a receipt for this transaction?” question.) With acknowledgement again to the complexities of a system I’m not familiar with, I’ll go out on a limb and say this situation could easily be resolved with a simple account preference: English or Spanish (and perhaps other languages in the future). Ah, but how to retrieve a user’s preference before the user is verified with their PIN?

• Store preference in the card – This is probably the most difficult option, as it would require some data storage on the card. Whether that’s a simple flag bit (“on”, the default, could represent English; “off” could represent Spanish) or a more useful setup (such as one that supports multiple languages and other preferences) would depend on the card’s capabilities. Plus, getting the data onto the card might require it be run through a magnetizing device at a branch. It might also require changes to the ATMs themselves to enable them to read this preference information from the card. Implementing this solution would likely be complex.
• Store preference with the account – The ATM knows your account number(s) when it initially reads the card, as that is stored in the magnetic strip. A solution could be to have the ATM query the bank’s database to look up the preference stored with that account. It might take a few moments, but it would certainly be less time than it takes to present a language choice, have the user read/recognize it, and select their choice. The language preference could be set (or changed) through online banking or in person at a branch, or perhaps even at the ATM itself.
• Avoid choice altogether – One solution would be to simply avoid requiring the user choose a language by displaying both English and Spanish together, as you often seen on food labels (and indeed on the instructions on the language-selection screen shown above). This approach, though, suffers because of the additional space required to display everything twice; and it certainly won’t scale to three or more languages. This could be ameliorated by relying more on images or pictograms instead of words—and numerals are the same in both language. But even this has problems: small images won’t display well on ATMs’ small, low-fidelity screens; and choosing meaningful, cross-cultural images to represent ATM selections creates a headache greater than the problem it would solve.
• Do nothing – It’s also possible (and probably likely) that this topic was discussed and US Bank executives decided that despite bloggers like me talking about it, the existing solution is best. It allows both English and Spanish speakers to select their preference and didn’t require any changes to their back-end systems.

Excepting the last one, any of these ideas—or one I’ve not even thought of—could solve this user-interface annoyance. Do I think it’ll actually happen? Probably not. Banks have a lot of other issues to deal with these days and honestly, I’d rather have them provide greater returns and do other important banking-type-things. With that said, there must be some enterprising young software engineer at the bank who could get this done and quickly rise through the ranks to become the youngest vice-president of the ATM division in the bank’s history!

Newer ATMs have preference settings for language, "fast cash" amount, and prepaid wireless.

UPDATE, July 2010 – I recently used an ATM in a different US Bank branch. Lo and behold, someone must have read this post and taken my ideas to heart! Well, perhaps not but regardless: this ATM had gotten its act together.