Divide the Pressure
A Research-Based Project on the Self-Checkout Process
As part of my Design for Behavior and Experience class in the Spring 2024 semester, my project partner and I decided to look into the choreography of human behaviors and movements surrounding self-checkout processes, and look for ways we could improve the overall experience.
Research
To begin our project we analyzed and documented people walking through a variety of checkout processes including Apple, Trader Joe’s, Target, Amazon Go, and Uniqlo. From there, we created diagrams to show the multiple touchpoints and steps throughout the process and break down the various steps of these choreographies. We primarily focused on Target due to the amount of self-checkouts that followed the same process.
Target
Trader Joe’s
Apple
Testing
From our research we identified there was a major effeciency issue between the payment and bagging portion of the self checkout process. From this we developed a concept called “Dividing the Pressure.”
The idea behind this was that you had a large buildup of pressure in the lines for the self-checkout, causing feeling of impatience, frustration, and anger. By just creating a bit more space between the area where people paid for items and bagged them, you could relieve that pressure and allow people to move more efficiently and removing some of these negative feelings expressed during our research.
We tested two prototypes and you can watch how these played out here:
Final Result
In the end, there was a clear actual time and felt time difference in the current checkout process and our prototypes. Here is the final product of our project:
Presentation
Here is a link to our final presentation, which goes more in-depth on our findings this project.