When I went home this July, I was fortunate enough to stumble across something I could comment on for design purposes – the Redbox Kiosk. If you haven’t heard of this company, its basic premise is akin to Netflix – you can rent movies from this company for low prices. I won’t give the buisness spiel, but if you are curious, you can go on ahead and check them out at redbox.com.

The kiosk is very simple, and equipped with a touch screen interface for you to find the movies you want to rent. You swipe your credit card, and in a second, the movies you want are immediately given to you from this little slot on the side of the kiosk. Getting movies very quickly from this machine is awesome, and I give the people who designed this part of the interaction a thumbs-up.

Returning movies, on the other hand, I personally had trouble with. There’s a label on the side of the machine that says to return the video, you insert the video in the slot and the machine should take it. So I did that, and the machine wouldn’t do anything. And then I thought – “maybe I need to push it in for it to accept the video” – and then I tried that for a couple of minutes, and it didn’t work. Boy, was I not happy at all with this machine. Turns out, there’s a label on the other side of the machine that tells you to return the video by selecting return on the touch screen. And then I felt extremely embarrassed, as I was in front of a giant grocery store pushing and shoving at this machine, with people staring as I was in epic fail mode.

Hopefully other people don’t have this trouble, but I thought I would let you know of this trouble I had, and that this interaction should be simpler than having to tell the machine to be set into receive mode – I should be able to just return my movie into the slot, just like I have done before when I actually went to a real video store. Those were some good times…

Have fun in the real world!