Not a touch screen

“This may sound a little weird, but can I take a picture of that?”

A point of sale terminal at a Jiffy Lube with an apparently disappointing user interface

I was in a Jiffy Lube, of all places, paying for an oil change, and I saw a powerful example of something that we’ve been discussing with clients over the past few months:  Great user experiences in one product area can drive user expectations across a wide variety of other products, services and use cases.

In this case, the touch screens on iPhones and other leading mobile devices are changing people’s expectations about how things should work on everything from televisions to digital cameras to point of sale terminals like this one.  Apparently, Jiffy Lube customers and employees keep trying to use this as a touch screen even though it isn’t one!

A similar example comes from the TiVo and DVR experiences many of us have become used to.  Haven’t you often wished you could pause or rewind your car stereo?  Or listen to the usual 8:00AM broadcast team even if you were on your way in to the office earlier or later than usual?

People are now coming to expect an incredibly rich, interactive, and easy to use experience from all the technology in their lives.  The benchmarks are products like the iPhone, the iPod, TiVo, and Blackberry, and you will be judged against these standards regardless of what price point you are trying to hit or product category you think you are in.

Does your product have a touch screen?  Tens or hundreds of Gigabytes of storage capacity?  The ability to stop, pause, rewind, time and place shift content?  The ability to move instantly and seamlessly between applications or functions?  WiFi or wide-area cellular connectivity – or, better yet, both?  Perhaps it should.