burned by an ATM
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009About a month ago someone stole $300 out of my account. I carelessly left my ATM card in a machine at Wamu and walked away, and whomever noticed it stepped up and did the wrong thing.
Cold hearted, cold cash.
If it wasn’t for my online banking - I checked it that night, I would have never caught the extra transactions and reported my card stolen so quickly. I was pretty lucky I guess - I wasn’t mugged… and it was only $300, all of which my bank reimbursed.
But still it really disturbed me that night. I don’t know what upset me more, the fact that these two women, living in my neighborhood, stood right beside me and made the withdrawal, or the fact that I got burned by an ATM machine.
Yes, you heard me…it wasn’t completely due to my error, but because of the machine’s design! I think I told that to the Customer Service rep on the phone too, he wasn’t listening.
Here I side with the school of Donald Norman, who says that we are not at fault for mistakes or errors ,usually, but that we are mostly the victims of poor design. Just remember the last time you went to pull a door with a huge handle that screams Pull Me! when it was meant to be pushed or vice versa.
I know I’m not the only one. Many people I know have given their cards to machines and then walked away. Fortunately, if it was the end of their transaction, the card is just left hanging, then it gets sucked back into the machine and returned to the bank.
In my scenario, I know that nobody saw my pin number. So I assume that the screen was hanging there with my card saying:
Can I help you with anything else?
I get this screen from time to time and think - “How thoughtful. Yes, I’d like to do something else….”
But this is the screen that allowed someone else to pretend they were me. This is the step that burned me. The last things to come out of the ATM were my receipt and cash, which are usually signals for Transaction Complete (especially the receipt). So out of habit I left the ATM, and this screen was waiting for the next person.
To check on this sequence I returned last week and made two tests to try and replicate the events that day.
The first time I didn’t get the outcome I expected. I knew I had made a deposit and then asked for cash, but when repeating these steps in Trial 1, my card came out at the end along with my cash and receipt.
But it could have went differently. During the ATM sequence, towards the beginning, the system asks if you would like to see the balance of your account. I chose this route for the second trial (Trial 2) and this is how it panned out:
Physical actions are bold. The highlighted steps are the shifty ones.
That’s what happened! The end - or what seemed like the end - of the transaction came : I was given a receipt and cash. But the machine still kept my card and wanted to know if it could “help [me] with anything else?” “Let someone steal my money” or “Feel like an idiot” might as well have been options for me here.
A couple things I don’t understand from this sequence. Why would the fact that I look at my balance at the beginning of the transaction trigger a different series of events? Did the designer think that because I was doing more than the average customer at the ATM that I’m the kind of bank user that needs to do several more things?
In my mind, receipt + cash = done. Its a signal (I’m a lot like Pavlov’s dog). I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I didn’t get my card back yet. I get a receipt at the end of every other buying experience I have. Why should this be different? And again, I don’t know why I should get two different outcomes.
I wonder if they tested all these user paths for error. I would think that since it is a money-dispensing machine that is not intended for long-term use that they would design it to be totally fool proof. The fact that I know several people who have made similar mistakes means they must have not tested enough.
The last thing - I promise - that comes to mind is the ATM you find at your local deli - small screen, out of service at times, and always charging fees. They may seem like shitty little machines - but I will never lose my card at one. This is because most of these machines have a kind of a forcing function:
It’s called the SWIPE.
The card never goes into the machine. It stays in your hand! Either a) its cheaper to make machines this way b) they are not as rugged as the ones that take your card at the branch c) the designer just thought a little more about it.
Whatever the reason, you’ll never leave the machine with the card still in it ready for your, or the other guy’s, next command.
But if it falls on the floor, I guess you could say that it’s out of the system’s scope.