dood, email me those photos of me+domo-kun? was half afraid, half hoping you'd post them here, but let's just keep them between us, ok? ;)
I know I'm not the only one who thinks that ATM interfaces were designed for short people. Now, I understand the ATMs that're made for drivers, who are naturally at a shorter level, but as a person who is tall, but not uncommonly tall, I'm a little miffed at how low the damn things always are, and it won't help if the interface was designed by someone from the short end. heh.
My bus pass is a swipe card, and has the stripe and its value positioned on the card so that the driver sees the value and its expiration month/year while the reader reads the stripe. More importantly, the card indicates which face should face me, and which way to swipe.
To be fair, it's easier for a tall person to use a short ATM than vice-versa.
The first ATM I used had an LCD display inside a plastic privacy shield (that is, the top, bottom, and sides of the display, which was something like 4x80, had a 2" plastic flat extension, so you were looking at the display as though it were the bottom of a 2" tall plastic box). I recall this because my mom and I had to use the ATM for my dad's account when he was at sea, and we couldn't find the display anywhere-- the box could be moved to a range of up or down angles for different heights, and my mom and I were short enough not to see the display.
We probably could've gotten through a transaction anyway, because the ATM, lacking a big 9" TV in the middle of it, had room for all sorts of colored buttons-- one color (2 cols.) for transaction types (withdrawal/deposit/loan pmnt, etc), one for account type (checking/savings etc.) and of course the number pad was in the usual spot. I recall that a basic withdrawal transaction was conducted fairly easily from left to right: withdraw, checking, keypad, enter, and then money came out. But my mom didn't want to try it, so we tried it another time when we could ask someone how to do it.
Also, I have a recollection of Jack Palance using a very early ATM on "Ripley's Believe It Or Not," and being vaguely skeptical (as an 8-year-old, or whatever) that it would ever be a serious thing.
Probably seemed as weird as life-before-ATMs seems today...
I'm a bit dyslexic, it's always been trivially easy for be to write mirror-image letters, or to translate/transpose objects in my head in 3D. Because of this, my brain automatically translates the ATM card images on the readers into alternate orientations. So I have a 60% chance of swiping the card wrong if I look at the image, because it begins rotating and flipping in 3D space as soon as I look at it. I have to stop and think for 5 seconds in order to align my brain with the image. In the image you posted, It looks "stripe up" to me.
It's all pretty annoying to me, I mean, you pay half a million for an ATM, and they saved $3 by not adding a second reader head on the other side ? come on!
$9, by not adding 3, to cover the other orientations...
But I could see an engineer balking at adding 3... I mean, it's kind of a kludge as well... the fudamental problem is that these cards can go in any of these ways, and the cards are symmetrical.
Yeah, you're right, they should do all 4. Still cheap compared to the cost. I can see not doing it on the little POS terminals, since they need to be cheap, but on those there are only 2 ways of orienting the card anyway.
I would love to see some innovative asymmetrical card designs that ameliorated this problem. They'd look cooler too.
What's the cost you're comparing to? Annoying us, and making everyone's life wore by a tiny amount...well, for the engineer, that's free!