Interface Fail - Kohl's Kiosk

Kohl's Touch Screen Kiosk

While escorting my wife around our local Kohl's and waiting for her to return from Customer Service, I approached a big touch based kiosk to help customer find products in the store, similar to other retailers I'm sure. Everything was running smoothly until I pulled up a large list of products, at which point I noticed a scroll bar, which put me in enough of a mood to snap this picture.

Scroll Bars Have No Place In Touch Interfaces. Period
Of course anyone with the slightest amount of programming experience will understand why we see scroll bars on touch interfaces. Laziness. The program was made with computers, and specifically a mouse in mind, a (legacy?) pixel perfect interface device.
If you step back and see what's going on you will notice that a sizable part of the results are HIDDEN from the consumer which adds a roadblock to a sale. Next you will notice that the down arrow is a relatively small target to tap with your finger, which again adds a roadblock to a sale. All of this is even more frustrating when you have several pages of results returned compounding the amount of tapping required. If you do the math you come up with a figure that stopped me dead in my track before I really wanted to, maybe even preventing a sale.

What To Do?
There are many examples of touch interfaces that are nearly transparent. Here is a MIT students thoughts about Red Box: http://web.mit.edu/2.744/www/Results/studentSubmissions/humanUseAnalysis/rljacobs/assessment.html
The student nails some key points, large buttons (easy targets to hit,) consistent themes (no on the fly relearning needed,) and prominent pictures of the products (our brains are plumed for visual processing.) All of these add up to a transparent interface, one that doesn't distract the user from their task. Why does it seem that kids can swipe/unlock a phone faster than they can tie a shoe? Well do shoes come with LCD's, big buttons, and pretty graphics....wait don't answer that, shoe are expensive enough.

Implications For The Future
Imagine this scenario for laughs: A brilliant programmer comes up with an amazing program (not Watson so don't ask IBM) that responds to natural voice commands. Proud of his work he packages it up and begins demoing it to customers. On the first run a customer asks a complex question (treating the program like search engine because that is how the customer is used to communicating with computers) and the program returns the results verbally. After the 10th result the computer stops, "is that all it found?" the customer asked, "well...you have to say a command for it to return the next....um...page of results..." the programmer mutters, understanding the obtuse nature of his explanation.

You Have Point?
How do "pages" fit into a verbal world exactly? They don't, they are a legacy of old limitations on processing power and screen space. My point is, even really really smart people can't initially think outside their comfort zone. And not just really smart programmers, customers/consumers/users need to think outside their comfort zone too. Does that mean we have to suffer with poor interfaces. No. It means we all have to learn, and keep on learning.