Posts

Showing posts from October, 2013

To ‘self-service’ or not to

Recently I was on Schiphol airport, where I did engage with some new self-service facilities. In general I do like technology innovations. However, they should be easy to use and these self-service facilities should work faster and with less faults/mistakes than human beings. That was not the case, so I think that these facilities were not professionally enough to be used. Let me share some examples. For the passport control there was a row of machines installed, which were supposed to read my passport and literally open the gate if I was cleared to proceed. However, I would say that it didn’t work for one in four of the cases, so there were still two officers there to do the manual check. I did ask one of them what their experience was and he said that they (police) were not ready to accept these machines from the airport yet, as they were not working properly. So, clearly the testing of the machines was not done properly and the travellers were used as guinea pigs.