Scott Bush

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.

Why do I have to keep select­ing English?

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 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!

There is a con­cept in mar­tial arts called zan­shin that I was exposed to recently that is quite amaz­ing. The Japan­ese term is actu­ally two kanji char­ac­ters, zan and shin:

The Eng­lish trans­la­tion varies, but a com­mon one is “remain­ing mind.” Defin­ing the term’s mean­ing can be tricky, and cer­tainly my inter­pre­ta­tion of it isn’t the only one, or even the “most cor­rect.” It was explained to me, along with other stu­dents in a karate class at NW Mar­tial Arts in Both­ell, by Hiroo Ito-Sensei. And if there’s any­one who bet­ter exhibits this con­cept… well, I cer­tainly don’t want to meet him!

In a fight, oppo­nents can be in an equally good position—posture, bal­ance, sta­bil­ity, strik­ing range, etc.—or one can have an advan­tage. True karate, as Ito-Sensei says, is never being fifty-fifty. “Always go for­ward,” he says, and that’s what zan­shin is. After strik­ing you shouldn’t let your body—and more impor­tantly, your mind—stop. If you must fight, there’s no point in trad­ing blows back and forth with an oppo­nent; attacks should be deci­sive. Once you strike, keep your mind and your ki for­ward to press the attack. The oppo­nent never has a chance to regain their pos­ture and there­fore their abil­ity to hit you.

That attack, though, doesn’t have to be destruc­tive. The true power of zan­shin is to “attack with the mind,” and that man­i­fests itself in your oppo­nent feel­ing like you’re about to crush them phys­i­cally. It’s a con­cept that still might not be clear even if I wrote para­graphs about it, but you’d under­stand in a moment if you expe­ri­enced it even once. But I’ll try any­way by describ­ing two sce­nar­ios, both of which begin with some­one throw­ing a right punch at your face:

1. You stand your ground and effec­tively block the punch by rais­ing your left arm solidly up and slightly out (a hara uke in karate terms);
2. You move for­ward slightly and effec­tively block the punch with a left hara uke and you stare intently at your oppe­nent, your right hand brought for­ward, clenched to a fist, and aimed aggres­sively at their face.

They sound sim­i­lar, and in terms of your safety from the ini­tial punch and phys­i­cal dam­age to your oppo­nent, they are the same. But sce­nario two is drip­ping with zan­shin. What do you think your oppe­nent is likely to do in each case? In the first, the attacker would real­ize his open­ing attack was blocked and he’d sim­ply strike again (prob­a­bly with his left). But in the sec­ond case, you’ve done much more than block the first punch: you’ve attacked with your mind by your slight for­ward motion, your stare, and your aggres­sive pos­ture. Trust me: zan­shin is pal­pa­ble! Quite lit­er­ally, it takes the fight out your attacker in a way that must be expe­ri­enced to be truly under­stood. You don’t even have to throw a punch to win a fight… now that is true mar­tial arts!

Of course, zan­shin requires the train­ing and more impor­tantly, the con­fi­dence to be effec­tive. And therein lies the challenge!

I’ve encoun­tered another denizen of the dic­tio­nary of imag­i­nary words. It’s much less com­mon than cousins such as “acrost” and “drownd,” but it does rear its non-existent head. That non-word, friends, is “complext.”

(more…)

Roughly a year ago I wrote a post titled “Mar­tial arts: the first year,” in which I dis­cussed what I’d learned and accom­plished after a year of train­ing. It seemed like a good idea then so why not do it again?

If I asso­ciate my first year of train­ing with rapid improve­ment, I’d have to clas­sify my sec­ond as improve­ment at a much more mea­sured pace. That’s to be expected, I think; when­ever start­ing some­thing new, one tends to improve quickly. Con­tin­u­ing on after that rush of new expe­ri­ences is where the ded­i­ca­tion lies in the mar­tial arts (and in craft­ing, play­ing gui­tar, singing—anything that requires much prac­tice to improve once a min­i­mal level of com­pe­tence is achieved). (more…)