Blah blah blah wrote Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly, managed large hospital and multipractice groups, ... Self checkout scenarios remind me a lot of the difficuly in building electronic medical record interfaces and workflows. UI really, really matters but is barely given a second thought by most vendors. These things frequently fail on UI but the blame is placed elsewhere. It took us roughly 8 years to create a solid reliable UI and workflow for most acute care and primary care settings that most of the people liked most of the time.

A good example I can think of personally is at McDonalds. It takes 22 finger clicks on the screen to order a medium iced coffee and approximately 140 seconds. There are numerous slow animations, the screens are slow to appear, slow to respond, multiple upsells, positions of buttons change on reflow after clicks. In person it takes "I'd like medium ice coffee light sugar", approximately 7 seconds for that and then the card processing time. Self service is 20 times worse.

Someone else mentioned theft reporting. Having recently spoken with a criminal defense attorney in a social setting, this is an out of control problem. He is in a medium sized city and has seen the number of shop lifting bans increase over 500-1000x. He would typically see a dozen or so per year but since self checkout became dominant in the area he is seeing thousands per year, nearly 1% of the population. This becomes a major problem in an area like this, if you get banned by walmart and safeway you have to travel 2 hours to get groceries, there are no other food stores. There is no recourse, the stores have no interest in trying to resolve these cases where, as the other commenter described, very common human errors resulting from terrible UI are criminalized.