Fax machines don’t talk August 9th, 2006

It’s been a while since I posted my last blog entry. I have been very busy with my job lately, so I haven’t had much time to work on usability stuff. Researching and reviewing usability is not yet my day-to-day job, since I’m still studying of course, but I got a part-time job by a employment agency during the summer holidays. My main tasks consists of assisting the IT helpdesk, so I get to see lots of users struggling with the computer.

I have to fax a form declarating the hours that I have worked to my employment agency. I have never used a fax machine, so it was quite an experience for me. In some way… It’s a pity I don’t have a picture of it, but I’ll try to describe just how usable the fax machine was.

The first thing I had to do was to insert the paper face down. After my sheet of paper was magically scanned, I had to dial the fax number. The tiny screen was displaying the number I dialed, and beneath it, there was some text commanding to press either the ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ button. Well, I wanted to sent the form to the employment agency, so I guess that’s a ‘Yes’. What happened? I had to type another number onto the screen?

I asked the friendly receptionist what I should do, and she told me I had to hit the ‘Start’ button instead. Sounds obvious, but the fax machine misled me with another option. The screen was now displaying ‘Ready 98%’ (it started to count from 98%, guess the designer skipped some elementary classes…). I figured that I probably had to wait till it reached 100%. I was waiting a few minutes till the machine beeped. The beep was quite useless, because what did the beep mean? It was a sharp high tone that sounded for approxmimately one second. To me, it sounded more like an error: this fax machine sucks rather than you have succesfully faxed a document. But the screen was now saying ‘Ready 100%’. Why did it still say ready? So both the visual and audible feedback was not clear, while I had to be sure that the document was really sent, otherwise there would not be much salary this month!

I decided to have lunch to supress my frustation and while lunching, I had a discussion with a colleague about my first experience with the fax machine. He told me he also felt somewhat uncertain when he faxed a document. And he got the same feeling when sending an email. How do you know whether the other party received it? To overcome this uncertainty, he called the recipient to check whether it had been received. Which he too, find ridiculous, because he could might as well deliver the message over the phone…

Feeling somewhat silly, I called the employment agency and they confirmed they had received the proper documents. Me + fax machine lived happily ever after…