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> Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.

Somehow I think I failed to think very deeply about this very important link! The twin happenings of the elimination of any retail career that pays a living wage, and the availability of GUIs and especially touch-screen GUIs happened simultaneously over a couple of decades, and the touch-screen dummy interface naturally won out. Not just because training that used to take two days for the 'green-screen' system I learned in 2001 now takes 15 minutes of instruction (and even that training is rather redundant for anyone over 95 IQ) -- also because the massive differential in productivity of an expert vs. new cashier/teller/pharmacy tech/etc. only even manifests if people are on the job long enough to become expert. And they're really not anymore.

Kinda why I prefer self-checkout. Even though the UI is firmly in "dummy" territory and I have to use a touch screen, I've used the current iteration of the self-checkout software more transactions than most cashiers I meet at Target, since they seem to have been there about 2 weeks on average.

by hylaride4 hours ago|

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Same story at my bank. Tellers used to speed run through a TUI, hitting tab and other key combos to accomplish things. Now it's a long wait with them mousing around.

by xp849 minutes ago|

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The best thing about all character-based applications I've ever used is the keyboard buffer. Even if you're using a TUI on a system that has a slow backend, it almost always blocked the thread and didn't consume from the buffer during waits, so if you knew the sequence of keys was "Total, F1, 1, Enter, Enter, Tab, 2125551234, F10, 1, Enter" you could just enter all those keystrokes as fast as you could and the system would eventually catch up with you, meanwhile you were bagging a purchase or counting out the cash, whatever.

The GUI also has lag - especially in the era of web-technologies-bloat, more lag than ever - but whether touchscreen or mouse there can't be a buffer, so each lag requires you to stare waiting for the next UI to be drawn.

by peterleiser4 hours ago|

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Agreed. Also, you can try to satisfy both new and expert users. It take more thought and design, but that principle is in both Nielsen's Heuristics and Shneiderman's Golden Rules.