Brussels Airport: Human Beings and Technology Complement One Another to Deliver A Good Experience
It’s Monday morning, early, as we are about to land at Brussels airport I decide to take the train rather than the taxi. On landing I look for and follow the signs for the train. I arrive at level -1. Now I am presented with choice: to get my ticket from the ticket machines (many of them, all of them available for use) or queue up at the ticket office and be served by a human being. I choose to queue up and be served by the human being.
To the lovers of technology and its promise to reduce friction and bring about nirvana my decision does not make sense. Surely it would be faster and easier. So why did I not use the machines? I lacked prior experience with these machines. I lacked the kind of contextual knowledge needed to figure what ticket I needed. And importantly, previous bad experiences – like the refusal to accept my credit card, or being told by the inspector that I had purchased the wrong ticket….
Further, and please make a note of this, I knew that the automated ticket machines do not have the same kind of being as a human being. What am I getting at? I am talking about flexibility, intuitive contextual understanding born from a shared humanity, and a natural inclination towards helpfulness. How best to illustrate? Follow my story and you will see.
Within 2 to 3 minutes of queuing up I am face to face with middle aged man behind a glass screen. Do I speak French or English? I notice that this man had been speaking in Flemish to his colleagues. So I speak English and ask him for a ticket to Bruxelles-Nord. He flexes: he switches to speaking English fluently. He flexes: he asks me if I want a single or a return. I tell him that I need a return. He tells me the price and issues the ticket.
Time to pay. I get out my credit credit and look at the card processing machine. I haven’t come across this type before. I cannot figure out where the card goes and which way it goes. So I ask the man. He flexes to meet my need: he shows/tells me the correct place and way of inserting the card. I am grateful as I had not seen that slot in the machine. I think bad design! Great that there is a human being to make up for the poor design of the credit card machine. I pay. I thank the man and make my way through automated barriers to the train.
When I arrive at Bruxelles-Nord I find myself happy. I took the road less travelled – I normally take the taxi – there were challenges. And the right combination of humanity and technology allowed me to overcome this challenges, easily, and left me feeling good. Good!
London Heathrow: Getting Technology and Humanity All Wrong
Same day. It has been a long day. Finally, I am off the aeroplane and making my way to passport control at London Heathrow- later than expected. The taxi driver has just rang me to ask where I am. So I am keen to get through passport control.
I arrive at passport control along with many others. Two choices – follow the lane for e-passports or the other lane. Not an easy choice. There is long queue in the e-passport lane as the demand falling on this lane is greater than the capacity of this lane. This lane is automated and the technology (the machines) are not keeping up with the human beings. On the other hand, there are only two lanes open in the other (alternative) lane.
Whilst in the midst of making the decision, I find myself shepherded into the e-passport lane. I wait. I wait. I wait. Finally, I am near enough to the machines, the technology, to see what is going on. There are 15 machines, only 10 of them are operational. Imagine if you ran a call centre and on a busy day one third of your staff were off ill. What kind of an impact would that have on service levels? OK, that accounts for some of the imbalance between demand and throughput. What else is going on? I look.
As I am looking, for about ten minutes or so, I notice a few things. I notice that the process of getting through the machines is longer – every time – than with a human being checking passports. So even if everything worked like clockwork, it takes longer to get through these machines. But everything isn’t working like clockwork. It is about as far from clockwork as one can imagine.
I notice that most folks simply do not how to use the machines. I can see the confusion on their faces. I can see their apprehension as they find themselves face to face with the passport (and facial recognition) machines. There are no easily (intuitively) understandable instructions. For example, folks don’t know whether to put the passport face up or face down in the scanning area. The machine does not detect wrong procedure and alert folks. It does its processing and when it is finished a big red cross comes up on the screen. But no useful error message or guidance.
At this point I ask you to think back to my situation at Brussels Airport. Remember me turning to and being served – as in helped out – by a human being? So you may be wondering what happened to the human beings at passport control. This is where it goes from bad to ugly. Allow me to explain.
I can only see one human being on my side of the machines – a woman in her late twenties. She is standing in front of machine 11 – only machines 1 to 10 are operational. She is looking at what is going on. Her contribution? To look down at the people struggling with the machines and provide useless advice. The looking down is evident in her face and her tone of voice. She keeps saying “If you put your passport against the machine and push down then it works fine”. Folks are doing that and for some of them it is not working out. Clearly, they are at fault given her stance.
I notice that every person who cannot get through the automated passport check – which is at least one in every three – is instructed by this young lady to go and see the man at the end of the line. I look and see that there is only one man at the end of the line. He is busy – there is long queue. The price of cost reduction through technology centred automation is being paid by us – the users. I look at the faces of the people like me waiting patiently to get through this nightmare. I can see the frustration, even contempt, in their faces. Some of them are voicing this frustration – in a very understated English way.
Where I Stand In Regard To Technology
1 – It is my experience that the claims made in regards to technology (in business) are puffery. Or, at best, aspirational – what folks would like to believe. Yes, technology can make things better. But it rarely does – especially not for the people who actually find themselves face to face with technology – the users.
Take Heathrow Airport, I am sure that folks selling the vision and benefits talked about: reducing costs by replacing many people with one machine, the throughput – how it would take less time for the machine to do the work of the human being, the improvement in the customer experience – easier, quicker, better, the reduction in risk as machines don’t get tired…. Now you compare my experience with the vision/promise. Notice the gap.
2 – Making technology work (for users) requires a deep connection with our own humanity (our way of being_in_the_world). And with the humanity of our fellow human beings through empathy. Yet this is THE quality that is lacking in the people who purchase technology (managers) and those implement technology. Further, neither party really cares for the users of technology. The users are pawns who are to be ‘change managed’ in order for the benefits of automation to be harvested. What are those benefits? As I mentioned in the last conversation they are almost always cost reduction.
3 – In service contexts, great experience design requires the right blend of the human beings and technology. Why? Technology is great where something can be reduced a technique – a logical sequence of invariant steps – and thus automated. Yet an intrinsic and persuasive feature of human worlds is unpredictability, novelty, variance. These are characteristics of living and life – especially intelligent life like ours. Technology sucks at dealing with this. But human beings don’t. Human beings have the capacity even an inclination to be flexible in an instant. Humans can get an intuitive grasp of the context (the background) and the user and her situation (the foreground). And we can flex to address the specific needs of this user in this context.
4 – It is easier to design and implement technology badly – from a user experience standpoint – then it is do it well. To turn around this situation requires a substantial investment in service designers and ux designers. As well as prioritisation of the user experience. For all the talk of Design Thinking there is little of it actually occurring – perhaps a drop in the ocean. As someone in an important position said to me recently “I don’t care about their feelings. I have a deadline to meet!” Further, most organisations are not willing to really get into Design Thinking – it requires a different mix of people, it involves getting out of the office and entering new worlds, it takes time, it takes effort, it requires experimenting and iteration. None of this appeals when the focus is implementing technology ‘out of the box’ this month using agile. Were speed and efficiency is of the essence the ground/soil necessary for human centred design is simply not there.
I thank you for your listening. Until the next time….
