This weekend I went camping with my sister and two of her kids at Devils Fork State Park in South Carolina. It was great: we went kayaking and hiking and I saw a luna moth, and even though the kids complained the whole time, I think they actually enjoyed themselves. Unlike me, who feeds himself while camping with dehydrated meals and peanut butter on tortillas, my sister brought real food to cook over the fire. This food needed to stay cold, which required getting ice. Getting ice required using god's most cursed ice machine.
It looks normal in the picture above, right? Maybe it's because you're far away. Here's a closeup of its various "instructions:"
The instructions, listed from steps 1 to 4, seem pretty straightforward. The trouble is that the machine doesn't work the way the steps suggest. "Step 1" above shows nothing and cannot be interacted with, so there's no way to find out how much ice costs beyond the machine having "1 vend" written on it, which is not a price. When my sister tapped her credit card against the yellow display to see what would happen it lit up, though still with no prices or information. It took pressing "Step 3: Ice," all the way at the bottom of the machine, to get the machine to tell us ice was $2.50.
Thrown off by Step 1 being a guess, and by Step 3 being Step 2 though really it should have been Step 1, we overlooked the part where I can now see it's clearly written that you're required to put the ice bag under the chute. When we tugged on the bags in the compartment they seemed firmly in place, leading us to believe they could fill themselves and then be removed. Then, we discovered that hitting the "Step 3: Ice" button again didn't dispense ice; we had to tap my sister's card again, at which point the bag did not fill with ice, but instead the ice came avalanching out of the chute all over the ground.
I'm willing to chalk the final outcome up to our mistake; the machine does say to pull out the bag. We wrestled a bag free and scooped up what ice we could salvage that hadn't immediately melted into the concrete. We had now spent $2.50 and only had about half a bag of ice.
We decided to try again. This time, feeling unhappy about how many times we'd been required to tap a credit card with no indication of when precisely we were charged, I decided to pay for the new ice with cash. I put a dollar into the slot, at which point the yellow display told me it was "cash only," though with no tally of how much cash I'd put inside the machine or how much anything cost. Knowing the cost of ice solely because we'd fucked it up once before, I fed two more dollars into the machine.
The machine happily gobbled up my money, but then nothing happened. We hit the various buttons in various orders, but it simply continued to tell us that it was "cash only." Hitting the "coins" button (why is there a "coins" button, and what is its purpose; does it make the machine accept coins, or does it return coins to me?) and the "Step 4: End Transaction" button did nothing. The machine sat there smugly with my money inside it, with no apparent further functions beyond accepting more cash, and also no way to make it dispense ice, since it appears the only way to make the machine dispense is by tapping a card a second time, even though it lets you put cash in it.
So we started the whole process again. We tapped my sister's card, which made everything restart. We hit "Step 3" as Step 2, wrangled a bag free a la the official Step 2 as Step 3, positioned it under the spigot, then tapped her card again to dispense ice. As the bag finally filled with ice, my sister remarked that we have six higher education degrees between us, but we'd spent a good 10 minutes and $8 on $5 of ice, when we only need $2.50 of ice to begin with.
This is a bad machine! In library school we learned about "affordances," the ways objects suggest they want to be used. From a design standpoint, the affordances on this ice machine suck: Your hands want to go to certain places in a certain order, but the machine isn't laid out that way. I would expect "Step 4: End Transaction" to be an initiating step, given that it's green (the color traditionally associated with starting things, not ending them) and close to the displays where your attention first gravitates when you approach. The Step 3 buttons (which are actually Step 2) feel like they want to make something physical happen, given that they're physical buttons and that they're close to where the machine dispenses, i.e., its primary physical activity. Beginning the whole interaction by tapping your card (thus committing to payment before you even know the cost of anything), then having to travel to the bottom of the machine to press physical buttons that don't perform a physical action, then having to travel back to the top to tap your card a second time–a more conceptual action that nevertheless kicks off the actual physical dispensing--feels wrong. Plus, all of this makes it unclear how many times you're being charged, and it doesn't put you in the physical position to receive your ice.
We went back the next day to get more ice and also so I could take pictures of the machine to write this blog, where we encountered a couple also wrestling with the machine, waving their credit card in its direction while scratching their heads. We were eager to share our wisdom with them, and they agreed the machine sucked. While I awkwardly explained being a tech journalist to some people who just wanted ice, my sister went inside and learned from the park ranger that 1) they knew the machine didn't work the way the instructions claimed, and 2) apparently the ranger in question wanted the park to buy a different machine, but this one was cheaper. They too were furious about the ice machine and hated watching people struggle with it.
At least this time, on our fourth interaction with the ice machine, we were able to sensibly get it to dispense the ice we wanted, and we filled a cooler to take on a hike. But the machine is still out there, and it still has my three dollars inside it, since in their shared rage at the machine, my sister and the ranger failed to negotiate getting my dollars back. Given that I earned those dollars by writing blogs like this, this means a fraction of your money is also inside the cursed machine, which at this very minute is probably tormenting more people who just want ice. Consider it a donation to a very nice park, and also a lesson in design.
Riley MacLeod
