The Interface of Restaurant Receipts
It happens. You get handed the credit card receipt at the end of the night, your date waiting across from you, and have to shuffle through the multiple copies of the receipt to find the one your need to sign. Yellow is merchant, white is customer? White is merchant, yellow is customer? What’s the third one doing there anyway? You hurriedly sign one, sweating over tip and total, only to find the waiter tapping your shoulder asking for you to sign the other one.
Okay, it’s not normally that bad. Unless your date is tapping-her-foot impatient. But I know that I’ve signed the wrong one on a couple occasions, and I have to think about which one to sign on most occasions. In fact, when I’m paying at the counter, the clerk will almost always point out which copy I have to sign as I hesitate.
Is there a way to make this better — making it so simple that I don’t have to think, and that clerks don’t need to help their customers sign the right thing? Bigger typography and better explanations? Nobody reads those anyway. How can we fix it?
I restaurant I went to today had a great little hack that made it totally obvious. It took me a bit to realize that I hadn’t even hesitated during the signing process. Their solution was simple: just wrapping my copies of the reciept — the things I didn’t need to sign — around my credit card. The receipt I needed to sign had the right affordances: next to the pen, laid out flat, begging to be signed. The receipts I didn’t need to sign also had the right affordances: they were wrapped around an object destined to go back in my wallet.
It’s an excellent interface, and a great example of physical mistake proofing and poka-yoke. When I think back, there are other restaurants that do this too. I never noticed because it “just worked”. It was invisible — just like a great interface should be.
What examples of this kind of everyday, physical interface improvements have other people noticed?
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jeffery callahan
this trick does immediately call out which copy belongs to the restaurant but has the minor drawback that you must unwrap the receipt if you’d like to record the gratuity amount on your “customer” copy.
why not simply stack them in order: restaurant copy, customer copy, card?
Greg
Actually, why does the customer copy even have a signature line? The fact that waiters have figured out a workaround is great but the receipt design doesn’t lend itself to this behavior.
On some receipts this is because it uses carbon paper and it prints to all layers at the same time. But I’ve also seen this on receipt printers that print one after the other. Ooops.
While we’re on the topic, why even give me a receipt at all? If I buy a doughnut that should be the end of the transaction, I don’t need a paper trail unless I ask for it.
zipkid
Or letting go of the signing altogether and just type your personal code on the mobile terminal. No more mistakes in which paper to sign.
zipkid
I forgot to mention… This is how it is done in most businesses in Europe.
Jimmy
Greg was that whole doughnut thing a Mitch Hedberg reference? I swear it had to be. If not look it up you’ll laugh.
Brian P.
All of the cases of this that I can remember the receipts are labeled customer copy and merchant copy. I look for that distinction. I guess in these cases they are not carbon copies. I don’t see carbon copies much anymore. And if they are carbon copies does it really matter which is which because I don’t recall any receipts not being white lately.
William J. Edney
Asa -
Was the “Resturant Reciepts” title intended? :-)
Also, if your date is ‘tapping-her-foot” impatient, then just sign whatever is put in front of you and head for your place :-)!!
Cheers,
- Bill
Patrick Dubroy
s/Reciept/Receipt/
Personally I’ve never been too confused by this. I usually just sign the top copy. I can’t remember a time when that was a problem. Works whether it’s computer printed or carbon paper.
But anyways, I do agree that wrapping them around your card is a good way to eliminate any confusion.
Another example of “real life usability”:
A lot of coffee shops have metal stirring spoons alongside the milk and cream. Usually there are two cups: one for clean spoons, and one for dirty ones. But this requires a label, which is often faded or covered up.
One coffee shop I go to has a good solution to this. They have two different types of containers. Clean spoons are in a cup with their handles facing upwards — an obvious affordance for grabbing one. Dirty spoons go into a long and flat container, so they are lying down and out of sight. Much harder to grab one accidentally this way.
Eric Shepherd
This technique actually annoys me. I don’t usually bother to take my restaurant receipts home with me, and just leave them on the table. When they wrap my credit card in them, I tend to forget to pick up my card and wind up making a mad dash back to the table to retrieve it.
Fernando Takai
Great that in Brazil we only have two – and the guy always give to you the right one with the pen – the other, he just gives to you when you right the other =D
James
How can they check your signature against your card if they’ve given it back to you with the receipt wrapped around it? Looks like an opportunity for fraud to me.
Ian Thomas (thelem)
When we used to have to sign card receipts, most places would hand you the receipt that needed to be signed and keep hold of your card. Once you had signed the receipt they would hand you your card and your copy of the receipt.
Not a problem with chip + pin though, as the customer never needs to touch the merchant receipt (if one is generated, which it often isn’t).
Thomas
@ Ian Thomas
But Chip + Pin have their own problems.
A lot of customers still have difficulty putting their cards in the correct way!
Secondly in smaller shops where the amount isn’t automatically placed on the Chip + Pin reader, the assistant has to enter the amount in manually. This can obviously cause the odd error.
Also certain machines require customers to press an Enter button to confirm the price before entering their Pin. The problem with this? People hate entering their pins and seem to zone out when they have to do it, therefore ignoring the assistant telling them to press the Enter button. This then results in four error tones which customers don’t seem to understand.
Benjamin Keating
I’ve noticed this too. I have not yet found a more invisible interface.
A good test is when you’re out for sushi and have had 3 bottles of Nigori. So far so good, I wake up the following morning with a receipt wrapped around my credit card. It works!
Now we need a tip and total validator… cause I have no clue what happens to the other copy. (:
Eszter Hargittai
Interesting post. I’ve always wondered about receipts more generally speaking, especially the unbelievable amounts of superfluous information that gets printed on them. (I think about this on occasion when I’m turning in reimbursements and need to tape them to a sheet. I prefer to conserve space so I cut off parts of receipts that are not necessary and sometimes end up cutting off more than half the receipt.)
I have a different reaction to the wrap-around approach. My reaction is that if my credit card was wrapped into a piece of paper then that must be the important piece, because the credit card is the thing I’m going to look for first when the waiter comes back. My first reaction then is to unwrap it. (It doesn’t work for me to wrap things around my card, because that’s not how I put things in my wallet.)
Like someone else above noted, I tend to look for “Merchant Copy” and sign there, but indeed, that is often missing, and in any case, we shouldn’t have to be looking for this info so carefully. I agree that it’s silly to have a signature line on customer copies and those should be eliminated when possible.
“Also, if your date is ‘tapping-her-foot” impatient, then just sign whatever is put in front of you and head for your place :-)!!”
Actually, she could be tapping her foot, because she’s had it with the evening and just wants to go home. Granted, in Aza’s case that’s probably not so likely.:)