Went to Rafferty's last night and used the 'meter' for the first time.....
My experience and impressions-
- can not see the keypad well - is is not lit up ! - No light in the panel to
illuminate it from the exterior and no back lighting within the keys. This is
ridiculous - Basic human factors engineering - If you cant reliably see and
read the input device it will be a problem using it.
- the receipt is not obvious - it drops into a closed compartment at the bottom
of the unit at about crotch level - again no light or indication that it's
there. Delivering it out a slot in plain sight would make more sense - more on
this later.
- the screen dialogue is flawed - one has to select a time first and then
insert the money for just that time - I wanted an hour and a half and could
only pay for 1 hour. Tried to 'Add Time' but the dialogue would not accept 30
minutes additional as input. - more on this later.
Had a great meal at Rafferty's - they have never disappointed. Watching the
clock indicated a need to feed-the-meter. Went out and purchased another hour,
grabbed the receipt (now that I could find the delivery chamber) and returned
to my meal.
My companion looks at the receipt and notices that it's for 30 minutes - I know
I put a dollar in - so we look at the original receipt - oh sh*t a different
space, number 5276 instead of 5279 - must have misdialed (no lighting -
remember)....
She runs out to take care of it and comes back with 2 receipts... ???
Seems that my receipt was still on the machine - I reached in and grabbed
someone else's receipt that they had left behind (likely because they had no
idea it was there).
Now we are looking at 3 receipts for our transactions...
original transaction - 6:18 - 1 dollar - good to 7:18
I add 1 hour- 7:16 - add 1 dollar - good to 8:16
She adds 30 minutes - 7:22 - add 50 cents - good to 7:52
??? WTF we just lost time ...... paid $2.50 and got 1 hour 34 minutes instead
of 2 hours 30 minutes.
Both being engineers we spend all of desert time trying to figure out what
happened..
Well is seems that purchasing time on a space does NOT add it to the existing
balance it deletes the existing time and resets the clock to zero - !!!
Further examination reveals that there is a code on the ticket labeled 'Add
Time' - An ah-ha moment - the add dialogue that would not accept 30 minutes as
input was actually asking for this code. - Not obvious.
This is not mentioned anywhere on the machine that we could find and the
dialogue question is not clear - 'Add Time Code:' should read as ' Add Time
Code From Ticket:'
All-in-all ... the meal was great the meters suck. no lighting , receipt in a
hidden compartment, faulty instructions. Think how much easier it would be if
all you had to do was enter a space number and start feeding in money to the
time you wanted ???
Good design and human engineering continue to decline in this day and age.
Happy New Year - Ba-Humbug...... etc
Werner
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