Lately, my work has me flying frequently on commercial airplanes. Most of these flights offered seatback entertainment, so I could watch a TV show or movie of my choice, or listen to satellite radio while reading. Touch-screen controls are easy to use because they let me touch—or tap—the item or the control that I want, to select a program, adjust the volume, skip to the next song, and so on.
One thing I’ve noticed is that about ¼ of seatback touch screens are poorly registered. By registration I mean that the system and the user agree on where the user is tapping or touching the screen:
I recorded a video of two common tasks for a seatback entertainment system: selecting the language and adjusting the volume. As you can see, the registration is off, so I initially get the French interface instead of the English, and I must press an unrelated button to adjust the sound:
The registration error is significant. My fingertip tapped about 2 cm left of the centre of the EN button. The larger the registration error, the harder to tap a small target—as was the case with the volume controls in the video, above, where I appear to be tapping the Fast-Forward button. On more than one flight I have unintentionally increased the sound to painful levels while attempting to lower the volume!
A system such as this could be made to detect and auto-correct poor registration. If we assume that repeat taps on a blank location indicates poor registration, the software could:
- After several repeat taps, select the nearest target—a reasonable guess—even if it is a centimetre or two away from the user’s tap.
- Ask the user to confirm the guess. “Did you mean [this one]?”
- If the user confirms, calculate the amount by which to correct the registration, and then fix the registration error.
This solution requires a screen—perhaps the start screen—whose choices are spaced far apart, so the system can detect when the user appears to be tapping a blank space:
If user testing were to show that auto-correction needs human involvement, after calculating the registration error, the system could ask the user to check the corrected registration. For example:
Are you there? Please tap the green circle.
I haven’t done any testing of this idea, nor have I given this much thought, so I’m certain there are many more and better ways to auto-correct a registration problem on a touch screen. I merely wanted to identify one possible solution in order to get to the next point: the need to consider the business drivers when deciding to address (or deciding not to address) a usability problem.
Everything costs money
Fixing this problem—it’s a real problem, you’ve seen the video—would cost money. If the following can be quantified and evaluated within a framework of passenger-experience goals, there may be a convincing business case:
- Not every passenger can work around a registration problem. Those who cannot would be unable to use the entertainment system. When everyone else gets a movie, how does the passenger with a failing system feel?
- If a failed entertainment system is perceived as a negative experience, will passengers blame the touch-screen/software manufacturer or blame the airline? I’m sure you can imagine the complaint: “I sat there for hours without a movie! It’s the airline’s fault.” What’s the likelihood that this will cause churn (passenger switches to another brand next time)?
- Based on the screens I’ve seen, some frustrated passengers must use hard objects that scratch and even gouge the touch screen. Are they trying to force the screen to understand what they want? Are they vandalising the screen? What’s the cost of replacing a damaged or vandalised screen?
- A scratched screen is like graffiti. It affects every subsequent passenger in that seat. Do vandalised screens affect the airline’s goal of attaining a particular passenger rating for perceived quality or aesthetic experience?
- The in-flight entertainment system was implicated in a catastrophic Swiss Air crash near Peggy’s Cove about a decade ago. Would a fix to the touch-screen registration problem incur prohibitive safety-testing costs?
I was on a flight last night (MAD-JFK) where the flight attendants rebooted the entertainment system three times, and apparently it still wasn’t quite right, although the games I was using were working. This didn’t affect me much, because I enjoyed reading the error messages during the reboot (the system is on Red Hat Linux). Plus, I wasn’t watching a movie, so I didn’t have to deal with it restarting three times. But at the end of the flight, the purser announced that Delta would give out $100 vouchers for the inconvenience. In my case, this was only one of four segments in my round trip flight, and I had a super-cheap ticket. I cared very little about the problem, but was happy with the solution.
Back to your points:
* I am just guessing, but I think the registration solution you suggest would not require safety testing, any more than a new Tetris game would be, if no new hardware or wiring is required.
* Passengers with failing systems should probably get a voucher, like I did.
* Very hard to say if entertainment system problems could provoke a switch to another airline. If that airline has the cheapest, most convenient flight, most people would take it again. Still, I guess you have to worry about even a small loss of customers.
* I am not sure what to suggest about the scratched screen problem.