In the past couple of years, it seems that ATMs have made huge strides in usability. The monster ATM of today, with all its blinking lights, dedicated slots, OCR of check amounts, etc. is a far cry from the screen with eight soft keys that was the norm a couple years back, and can still be found on a lot of the high-fee generic corner-store ATMs I use when I’m in a pinch.

During a transaction with my a Bank of America ATM (I have a checking account with them) I noticed that a button appeared on-screen for me to enter a customized Fast Cash amount. If you’re not familiar with Fast Cash, it’s basically a shortcut feature that lets me easily withdraw predetermined amounts of money (in increments of $20) without having to go through an extended flow of screens which includes choosing a source account, choosing withdraw, etc. I just enter in my PIN, choose Fast Cash, and I’m at this screen:

That blue buttom on the bottom – the one that says “Set Fast Cash Preference” – is new! When I press it, it takes me here:

And then, once I enter in a value, say $120, and press “Enter,” I’m taken back to the Fast Cash screen which now looks like this:

 And there is my customized Fast Cash amount, accessible with one button press.

I think customization is a good thing; I’m all for using technology to make users’ lives easier. And this is a nice example of using a tiny bit of stored intelligence to streamline what would probably be a pretty common task – taking out money from the ATM. I mean, the banking system maintains all the information about the state of your finances, each and every deposit and withdrawal you’ve made. They have all this information anyway, so adding in a feature like this would seem like a no-brainer. Taken to the next level, this kind of reminds of me of some of the adaptive menus in Microsoft Office. It knows how often you use certain items, and thus bubbles those items to the top, demoting or hiding less-often-used items. Could an ATM not do the same with withdrawal amounts? 

I wonder what research drove the addition of this feature. Do most people take the same money out of the ATM every time they go. Does entering in a custom amount other than the $10, $20, $30, $50, $80, and $100 that is already offered pose a pain point for customers? What does the distribution of average dollar amount taken out per ATM visit look like.

I suppose if they found that many people consistently take out the same dollar amount each visit, and this amount is something that is not covered by the six presets that are offered, then this custom Fast Cash feature could make people’s lives a bit easier. 

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under User Interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.