SINGAPORE: After alighting from my app-hailed ride and breezing through the automated biometric immigration channel at Changi Airport, I decided I needed a local food fix before boarding my flight.
So I made a beeline for the nearest food court, where my appreciation for Singapore’s smart city aspirations quickly evaporated.
The food court itself was relatively empty, but at its entrance where there were four self-ordering touchscreen kiosks, were long, slow-moving queues comprising harried airport staff, curious tourists, and hungry local travellers.
Stuck in line, I had plenty of time to arrive at the realisation that the kiosks offered too much choice. The dozen food stalls sold eight or more dishes each, each dish customisable to a granular level. The designers of the interface clearly knew local hawker fare like the back of their hands.
While useful for regular customers or those familiar with local fare, many tourists can’t tell a laksa from a lamian, or a prata from a pappadum. I’m sure they would have navigated a similar kiosk at McDonald’s with ease, but the sheer number of unfamiliar options at these kiosks seemed to unnecessarily complicate the ordering process.
And so, the befuddled foreigners ahead of me took 15 minutes to swipe and scroll their way through each stall’s menu, while Google-ing on their smartphones to research and confer on what certain dishes were. They took another five minutes to order a plate of chicken rice, and five more to pay by credit card.
In the meantime, several hungry folks had given up queuing and left.
Any local hawker worth their salt would have manually rung up, collected payment for, and served 20 plates of food within that time frame.
When it was my turn, I ordered my mushroom minced meat noodles in one minute (dry instead of soup, mee pok over kway teow, mee kia or mee sua, extra chilli and vinegar, no extra egg, liver or pork balls) – because I knew exactly what I wanted.
My heart was also set on a kopi c kosong – black coffee with evaporated milk and no sugar – but it took me five minutes of scanning all 12 stalls’ menus before realising that not a single drink option was to be found. I found this odd, but paid anyway and entered the food court to wait for my noodles.
Once inside, I finally spotted a sign right in front of the drinks stall: “Please order your drinks from the drink stall inside the food court”. Shouldn’t that sign have been outside or indicated somewhere on the terminal displays?
That experience left a bad taste in my mouth – and it wasn’t my noodles.
Isn’t technology supposed to make our lives better and easier? It seems to me that digital solutions in daily life should simplify tasks, rather than make things more complicated because of poor planning or user design.
Perhaps operators of food courts that see heavy tourist footfall could have one dedicated terminal marked “This kiosk accepts foreign credit card payment”, programmed to feature a fixed number of popular local dishes for tourists, such as chicken rice, laksa, prata and so on, with brief but eloquent descriptions of each dish.
This approach would not only help tourists make quicker decisions, it would also improve customer satisfaction and reduce the chances of them walking away due to confusion or long wait times, potentially increasing revenue for hawkers and food court operators.
The lack of user consideration in tech solutions isn’t noticeable only in airport food courts.
How many times have you argued with your rideshare driver about the best route to take to your destination? Online maps sometimes have no real-time idea that certain roads have closed or opened, or that off-road detours allow you to dodge traffic build-ups at popular junctions.
Attempts to notify drivers of these are often shut down with a flat “Err I dunno, I just follow GPS”.
This year’s SimplyGo debacle is still fresh in many minds, whereby the LTA had to reverse their decision to phase out the older ticketing system following widespread complaints.
I’m still annoyed that since giving up my EZ-Link card, I don’t know how much I’m paying for each train or bus ride.
It’s not that I find public transport unaffordable; nor am I the penny-pinching sort. It would just be nice to be able to immediately see if I’d been charged S$500 to travel from Novena to Orchard due to some unexpected tech glitch, and report it right away.
At supermarkets, I notice that the holdups at checkout counters and self-service kiosks are usually caused by people trying to make payment with app-based vouchers or loyalty points.
At restaurants, has anyone ever experienced a situation where after scanning the QR code menu and placing your order, you realise only half an hour later that you’d somehow missed an extra step to double or triple confirm your orders, leaving it unprocessed in the system?
Even familiar household gadgets have become too smart for our own good. Imagine dumping yoghurt and berries into your new blender to whizz up a quick breakfast smoothie, but the blender’s smartphone app has hung, and the blender itself doesn’t even have a physical on/off button – and you’re now officially running late.
Stories abound on the internet of smart-home owners losing their smartphones and finding themselves unable to operate their lights, air-conditioning, doors or blinds.
Many people have been successfully nudged to be more physically active thanks to activity trackers like Fitbits – but cases of orthosomnia are also on the rise, a condition where users get so obsessed with their tracker’s sleep data that they develop sleep disorders.
Some mishaps are downright horror stories.
Last month in Toronto, four passengers involved in a car crash died in their burning Tesla after its electronic doors would not open allegedly due to power failure from the crash. (There are manual release levers tucked away somewhere – something that most Tesla owners, let alone passengers in a state of panic or immediate peril, aren’t likely to remember.)
I’m not such a Luddite that I believe tech is going to destroy us all. I appreciate how my smartphone connects me to people, goods, services, information and entertainment.
And I have high hopes for artificial intelligence in healthcare, especially as healthcare systems in Singapore and all over the world continue to be stretched beyond their capacities.
But if the point of tech is to benefit humanity, then it should be designed in a way that maximises said benefits without causing undue disamenities.
Tracy Lee is a freelance lifestyle writer based in Singapore.
Continue reading...
So I made a beeline for the nearest food court, where my appreciation for Singapore’s smart city aspirations quickly evaporated.
The food court itself was relatively empty, but at its entrance where there were four self-ordering touchscreen kiosks, were long, slow-moving queues comprising harried airport staff, curious tourists, and hungry local travellers.
Stuck in line, I had plenty of time to arrive at the realisation that the kiosks offered too much choice. The dozen food stalls sold eight or more dishes each, each dish customisable to a granular level. The designers of the interface clearly knew local hawker fare like the back of their hands.
While useful for regular customers or those familiar with local fare, many tourists can’t tell a laksa from a lamian, or a prata from a pappadum. I’m sure they would have navigated a similar kiosk at McDonald’s with ease, but the sheer number of unfamiliar options at these kiosks seemed to unnecessarily complicate the ordering process.
And so, the befuddled foreigners ahead of me took 15 minutes to swipe and scroll their way through each stall’s menu, while Google-ing on their smartphones to research and confer on what certain dishes were. They took another five minutes to order a plate of chicken rice, and five more to pay by credit card.
In the meantime, several hungry folks had given up queuing and left.
Any local hawker worth their salt would have manually rung up, collected payment for, and served 20 plates of food within that time frame.
Related:
BAD TASTE
When it was my turn, I ordered my mushroom minced meat noodles in one minute (dry instead of soup, mee pok over kway teow, mee kia or mee sua, extra chilli and vinegar, no extra egg, liver or pork balls) – because I knew exactly what I wanted.
My heart was also set on a kopi c kosong – black coffee with evaporated milk and no sugar – but it took me five minutes of scanning all 12 stalls’ menus before realising that not a single drink option was to be found. I found this odd, but paid anyway and entered the food court to wait for my noodles.
Once inside, I finally spotted a sign right in front of the drinks stall: “Please order your drinks from the drink stall inside the food court”. Shouldn’t that sign have been outside or indicated somewhere on the terminal displays?
That experience left a bad taste in my mouth – and it wasn’t my noodles.
Isn’t technology supposed to make our lives better and easier? It seems to me that digital solutions in daily life should simplify tasks, rather than make things more complicated because of poor planning or user design.
Perhaps operators of food courts that see heavy tourist footfall could have one dedicated terminal marked “This kiosk accepts foreign credit card payment”, programmed to feature a fixed number of popular local dishes for tourists, such as chicken rice, laksa, prata and so on, with brief but eloquent descriptions of each dish.
This approach would not only help tourists make quicker decisions, it would also improve customer satisfaction and reduce the chances of them walking away due to confusion or long wait times, potentially increasing revenue for hawkers and food court operators.
Related:
TECH SOLUTIONS, OR TECH PROBLEMS?
The lack of user consideration in tech solutions isn’t noticeable only in airport food courts.
How many times have you argued with your rideshare driver about the best route to take to your destination? Online maps sometimes have no real-time idea that certain roads have closed or opened, or that off-road detours allow you to dodge traffic build-ups at popular junctions.
Attempts to notify drivers of these are often shut down with a flat “Err I dunno, I just follow GPS”.
This year’s SimplyGo debacle is still fresh in many minds, whereby the LTA had to reverse their decision to phase out the older ticketing system following widespread complaints.
I’m still annoyed that since giving up my EZ-Link card, I don’t know how much I’m paying for each train or bus ride.
It’s not that I find public transport unaffordable; nor am I the penny-pinching sort. It would just be nice to be able to immediately see if I’d been charged S$500 to travel from Novena to Orchard due to some unexpected tech glitch, and report it right away.
At supermarkets, I notice that the holdups at checkout counters and self-service kiosks are usually caused by people trying to make payment with app-based vouchers or loyalty points.
At restaurants, has anyone ever experienced a situation where after scanning the QR code menu and placing your order, you realise only half an hour later that you’d somehow missed an extra step to double or triple confirm your orders, leaving it unprocessed in the system?
Even familiar household gadgets have become too smart for our own good. Imagine dumping yoghurt and berries into your new blender to whizz up a quick breakfast smoothie, but the blender’s smartphone app has hung, and the blender itself doesn’t even have a physical on/off button – and you’re now officially running late.
Stories abound on the internet of smart-home owners losing their smartphones and finding themselves unable to operate their lights, air-conditioning, doors or blinds.
Many people have been successfully nudged to be more physically active thanks to activity trackers like Fitbits – but cases of orthosomnia are also on the rise, a condition where users get so obsessed with their tracker’s sleep data that they develop sleep disorders.
Related:
HOW TO MAXIMISE REWARD AND MINIMISE RISK?
Some mishaps are downright horror stories.
Last month in Toronto, four passengers involved in a car crash died in their burning Tesla after its electronic doors would not open allegedly due to power failure from the crash. (There are manual release levers tucked away somewhere – something that most Tesla owners, let alone passengers in a state of panic or immediate peril, aren’t likely to remember.)
I’m not such a Luddite that I believe tech is going to destroy us all. I appreciate how my smartphone connects me to people, goods, services, information and entertainment.
And I have high hopes for artificial intelligence in healthcare, especially as healthcare systems in Singapore and all over the world continue to be stretched beyond their capacities.
But if the point of tech is to benefit humanity, then it should be designed in a way that maximises said benefits without causing undue disamenities.
Tracy Lee is a freelance lifestyle writer based in Singapore.
Continue reading...