Ergonomic assessment of a parking ticket payment machine for filipino use

Abstract

Over the last few years, establishments in the Philippines have slowly moved towards full utilization of automated car parking ticket machines that have been employed all over the world. However, because this is new to the Philippine setting, there have been issues and complaints from users in operating the current machines, resulting to establishments reverting to hiring personnel to manually manage parking fee payments. A physical and cognitive usability study was conducted on a parking ticket machine in a shopping mall in the National Capital Region through observing users as they performed the process of paying through the machine. Task completion rates and errors were recorded for 100 users of the machine, who also answered a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. Three key metrics were measured: (1) the average time spent by new and experienced users, (2) the relative efficiency of manual and automated payment modes, and (3) overall user satisfaction. Results of the study showed a significant difference between average completion times of new and experienced users. SUS survey results showed that users found the machine to be fairly easy to learn, and that transactions through the machine can be faster than that of a cashier. However, a wide range in task completion times was observed for the automated process. This can be attributed to several errors and issues encountered during the payment process of some customers, primarily with the cash inlet rejecting certain bills and new users having difficulty identifying the appropriate slots of the machine. It was also observed that users encountered problems due to a mismatch between machine dimensions and their anthropometric measurements, particularly height. The study proved that poor parking ticket machine utilization was due to problems in human-machine interaction as well as mismatches between physical dimensions and user population anthropometry. Recommendations were provided in order to improve machine dimensions, layout and overall usability.