Is there a reason banks make ATM menus ambiguous?

Factual Questions
1

When an ATM gives you a simple yes/no choice, if it is the kind of ATM that has a video screen with buttons on either side of the screen, in my informal survey the interface is always designed so that your two selections are immediately above and below one another. Because the height of lines on the screen is often poorly registered with the button locations, that makes the choice ambiguous.

So for example the screen will say:

DO YOU WANT ANOTHER TRANSACTION?


<- YES

<- NO

It looks to me like it would have been just as easy for them to design the screen like this, so that there was no ambiguity:

DO YOU WANT ANOTHER TRANSACTION?
<- YES NO ->
This has been a pet peeve for years, and I have been looking for a screen layout that avoids ambiguity. So far, every ATM that I have used that could have made it ambiguous or unambiguous has made it ambiguous.

I no longer think it is plausible that this is meaningless coincidence. I now think that banks for some reason opt to make the choice ambiguous.

But what is the reason?

Credit cards that offer a low rate as long as you pay the bill on time, for example, have a great reason to trip you up. If they can claim a payment was late, they can charge you more.

Is there some benefit banks enjoy when you answer ATM questions incorrectly?

2

Now that the message is posted I see that somehow SDMB strips multiple spaces from my typing.

The lines that read

should look like a button on the left of the screen and a second button on the right of the screen, like this:
------------------------------------------------------------
only without all the dashes.

3

In fact, now that everything seems to want to misinterpret what button I am pushing, which should be the very essence of black-and-white, I will ask the second question:

Is there some benefit SDMB enjoys from removing space characters from what I type?

4

Blame your browser. If you look at the HTML source for this message You’ll see a lot of whitespace that was stripped out when the message was displayed. However, the fact that you can see it in the source proves that the spaces were retained in the database.

5

Napier, if you want to preserve spacing, use the


 tag.
6

I know what you mean about ATM questions, but I doubt it’s because banks gain from ambiguity. My guess is inertia. Designs in such systems change if they are grossly suboptimal. If they pretty much work ok they stay.

7

I think I know what you’re asking. You’re wondering why the on screen options don’t exactly line up with the buttons on the sides?
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I think a lot of it is hardware design getting mixed up with different software and video resolutions coding stuff. There are probably a good dozen software companys that do most of the design and layouts to their liking, then you got hardware design too. I think it’s getting much better though. - If that’s what you’re talking about.

8

I totally agree with your comments about the ATM. Why don’t they adjust the lines so that they match up perfectly? And why not provide an alternative to those side buttons–like, “or press 1 for another transaction”? Do those side buttons, which are hard to reach from a car, actually help anyone? I’d much rather press “2” to withdraw from savings, then have to unbutton my seatbelt to reach that stupid button, and hope I’m pressing the correct one, since there are three lines on the screen with arrows, but 4 buttons, and they do not line UP!

If it is so hard for the banks to get them to line up, the least they could do is make four lines for four buttons, jus so I could figure out which button they point to!

9

Some of the ATMs in Ireland are really annoying, though they seem to have the left/right thing sorted.

**Which transaction do you require?

Cash no receipt … Cash with receipt **

I always hit ‘no receipt’.

Then it often goes:

**Due to a machine fault, we are unable to provide a receipt for your transaction. Do you wish to continue?

Yes … No **

Well duh, I specifically DON’T want a receipt, you dumbass.

Secondly, the “No” button is the one that is normally marked “Continue” on other menus, so I routinely hit this, then find my card being spat out, and I have observed this happen to many people in front of me.

I think it’s all down to their UIs being programmed by regular programmers, not UI specialists.