Yes, my personal record is 6’4"
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Yep. Also nearly all of it is written in legacy programming languages and frameworks (cobol, early versions of vb, dotNET 1) on legacy OS (windows xp, DOS running inside winxp, DOS running on xp mode in win7). Good luck convincing the people who suppoet these systems adding whatever features for receipt printing is as important as making sure the whole thing runs at all.
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It’s been a few years (15ish) since I worked in a grocery store, but I found the placement of the security cameras telling. All checkout lanes had cameras directly over the cashier. The entire frontend was covered by mutiple cameras. Of course a camera in the HBC aisle and entrances, but no where else. It’s almost like they trusted the employees less than the customers…
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I assume the problem you mention with circles is why she’s included a percentage number on all the major ones. Though, my supervisor insists that people are generally bad at intuitively understanding percentages and I might agree. She prefers using terms like four in ten instead. Still, this receipt is not a scientific article, it’s just meant to be an aid to understanding rough trends in your shopping.
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I’ve been known to complain about a great many trivial things. But boring-looking receipts was never one of them.
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I’m actually kind of shocked this doesn’t already exist, given that grocery store member/discount cards have been a thing for a solid two decades at least. A data breakdown on a per-household basis over a one- or multi-month period would be a lot more useful for… whatever it is they’re actually trying to achieve here (choosing a better proportion of healthy food? managing food purchase budget? is there a goal that isn’t obnoxiously paternalistic?) than a froofy visualization of data I can already get at a glance from the physical goods in my shopping cart.
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I would not like this receipt
I have thought this repeatedly. I have a friend who enters all of her purchases into an excel spreadsheet, to the ITEM level. So she can tell me how much milk, eggs etc she bought last month. Loyalty programs are a thing- they obsessively ask for my phone number- so I’d like to be able to do something with my own data, thanks.
Of course, loyalty programs are about getting more money out of me, the consumer. This would not be helped by my seeing an item level breakdown of everything I’ve spent in the last year. Then when I saw a sale I could say “oh yes this is a better price than the last several times I bought this- I will buy 3 months worth”- or say “nice try store, your ‘sale’ is about average for that item for me!”
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depends maybe. i think a lot of registers are repurposed web browsers these days. doesn’t mean the backend is particularly clean though.
( and i might prefer cobol over php. ugh. ugh. )
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I feel it’s like designing a better steam engine, as the supermarkets and other registers near my home are moving to a paperless display, printing a receipt only on request. The Aldi and Lidl supermarkets have set up their registers so that the customer sees what was scanned, and how many. The screens provide reassurance to the customer that no errors were made.
I think what we may see soon is a protocol for NFC transfer of the receipt into a phone app, designed to interact with home budget software or for those things that are under guarantee. Most likely a bunch of proprietary formats until the various register manufacturers and retailers can agree.
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A “better” design which uses significantly more paper, and not just regular paper but non-recyclable BPA coated thermal printer paper at that.
The juxtaposition of this with all the breathless articles BB run about how awful climate change is and how great it is when we do [this/that/the other] to alleviate it is hilarious.
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Coincidence that everyone else can, too, including staff…
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I quote:
So, she doesn’t really. Although one could argue that in this instance, she is the intended end-user so anything that gets her to actually look at her receipt has achieved the intended result.
So, the supermarket.
Gasp…! But, but… that just looking at data, you can’t do that, you have to visualise it first.
Carping aside, I can sort of see her point. As I understand it she’s not sticking new info on the receipt, the information is there already, she was playing around with how it’s presented.
Seems a perfectly hoopy thing for a frood with an interest in data display to play around with.
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Depends on the viewing angle, though. And this is a grocery store, not a pharmacy where the haemorrhoid cream and condoms might be a source of embarrassment.
For some.
Ahem.
Me, I am grateful for the chance to make corrections before the final tally is rung up (“Sorry, but that was only five bottles of whiskey, not six…”).
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I hate to sound like a Luddite, but no thanks. I’d rather deal with the scrolls that CVS issues than have to have Yet Another App, not to mention that I don’t and won’t use my phone for anything financial. Security updates can’t be counted on in Android-land, and Apple has its own set of drawbacks. I was pleasantly surprised to find a recent update waiting for my three-year-old LG on T-Mobile, but I can’t count on any further ones.
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No thanks. I just want the list. This information is of no use to me on a receipt as it’s after I’ve bought everything. I’m not trying to balance this stuff out in the supermarket because each visit is optimised based on what I already have. If I got a fridge full of steak at home then telling me I bought nothing but carbs? Yeah, I know, that’s why I went. Why are you telling me?
Also, it feels hella preachy.
Yeah I can see that (it would help ensure a customer isn’t shoplifting) but usually there is nobody there to check the receipt and most people pay with plastic nowadays.
You’ve mentioned before that you live in Minneapolis in Seward—I do too—I wonder which co-op you shop at. At Seward Co-op, P6 was replaced by the new Community Foods program…it’s small, local, cooperative, inclusive, sustainable producers, and it’s broken out on the receipt the same way P6 was…which sounds like what you’re interested in…but it sounds like you would know about it if you shop at Seward—maybe you shop at one of the other co-ops.
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Data visualization is all well and good, but it’s kind of the statistics of the design world… people pretend it’s objective and neutral, but really it’s one of the easiest ways to introduce agenda or bias to your communication. So I’m suspicious of this kind of exercise, where there is no stated communication goal, because it means there’s likely a subliminal one. Or at least a bias being revealed, even if it’s just something like “this is definitely the kind of distribution of items people buy in a single grocery trip, because household size and composition, geographic location, economic status, etc. are inconvenient outlier factors.”
Also maybe I’m a lazy designer looking to avoid changes to the status quo, but my first question on this kind of thing is “why is that data useful and who wants to know it,” followed closely by “are there extremely common use cases that will totally break this model,” neither of which appears to be considered here. The data is presented based on cost, but visualized like volume? The discrepancy between the average cost of items in different categories is unaddressed? I could buy one meal’s worth of organic produce, then two cases of instant ramen and six boxes of twinkies and the produce circle would still be the largest. What does the visualization mean in that context? Is it helping me understand something accurately, or is it misleading? Similarly, if I swing through the store before my cheese plate party for one last 60-cent box of toothpicks and a pricey bottle of wine, what does that chart look like with the relative costs shown by size? Is it still legible and attractive?
If your design has no communication purpose and only works for a cross-section of idealized use cases, it’s an inherently unsuccessful design.
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