Why shoppers walked past the fastest way to check out
Landmark Group –
Overview
Landmark Group’s fashion stores, including Max, offer self-service checkouts (SSCOs) to cut queues and save customers time. Alongside a scan gun, they have an RFID scanner: put your items in, and it reads every tag in one go, no scanning one by one.
We set out to make the checkout screens simpler, but our usability tests kept pointing somewhere else. The fastest part of the checkout was the one customers struggled with most: they didn’t notice the RFID scanner, didn’t know how it worked, and fell back on slower habits.
- Longer for customers to check out with RFID than for a product owner who knew how it worked
- 13×
- Participants spotted the RFID scanner quickly
- 2 of 5
- Loved RFID once they’d used it
- 4 of 5
- Retailers benchmarked: Inditex, Uniqlo, and Azorte
- 3
I ran the research with Adeorike Oshinyemi and Mohsin Khan, alongside the product owners for our self-checkouts.
The problem
Speed is the reason customers choose self-checkout. Yet our SSCO screens gave a lot of space to secondary actions, features outside the core journey that still competed for attention with the steps customers actually needed.
We suspected this was costing time: more on screen means more to read, more to ignore, and more chances to get confused. Understanding which actions customers valued would let us cut the risk of cognitive overload, focus the screen on what people prioritise, and bring down the time it takes to complete the core journey.
How we tested
- When
- April 2023
- Where
- Max, Oasis Mall, Dubai
- Method
- Moderated usability tests on a live SSCO
- Participants
- 5 shoppers, a mix of first-time and experienced self-checkout users
- Tasks
- Check out with the scan gun, remove a hard tag, and check out with the RFID scanner
- Moderators
- Adeorike Oshinyemi, Mohsin Khan, and me
The research changed course
Early in the sessions, it became clear that secondary actions contributed very little to how customers experienced the checkout. Most participants barely noticed them. What they did notice, and struggled with, was RFID.
So we followed the evidence and reprioritised our objectives:
- Gauge customers’ understanding of, and feelings about, the RFID scanner
- Find out which actions customers value most in the SSCO journey
- Gauge the value of secondary actions
- Understand why hard tag removal and scanning items one by one take longer at the SSCO
Where the time went
We timed every participant on each task, and asked a product owner who knew the SSCO well to do the same. The gap was widest exactly where the technology should have made checkout effortless.
Check out with the scan gunAverage 1m 10s
Average 1m 10s. Participants: 55s, 1m 32s, 1m 15s, 56s, 1m 12s. Product owner: 25s.
Remove a hard tagAverage 1m 3s
Average 1m 3s. Participants: 1m 4s, 1m 1s, 1m 53s, 23s, 53s. Product owner: 1m.
Check out with RFIDAverage 1m 35s
Average 1m 35s: 36s finding the scanner, 59s scanning. Participants: 2m 22s, 2m, 57s, 1m 50s, 12s. Product owner: 7s.
Five participants, so read these as directional. One participant’s time to find the scanner wasn’t recorded, so their dot shows scanning only.
The product owner finished the RFID task in 7 seconds. Customers took more than a minute and a half, and over a third of that went on simply finding the scanner. The technology wasn’t slow; the experience around it was.
What we heard
Six themes came out of the sessions.
RFID is a real convenience
4 of 5 participants loved its speed
“It’s very easy. The waiting time is much less.”
Participant 4 Once they’d used it, participants valued scanning several items at once. One even rated our checkout above Carrefour’s because of it.
Nobody had told them about it
“We don’t hear about this before. There’s no real marketing for this.”
Participant 3 There was no online or in-store communication about RFID, so customers arrived without knowing it existed, or that some products aren’t compatible with it. When those items didn’t appear in the basket, they were confused.
The scanner was hard to spot
2 of 5 participants found the scanner quickly
“It needs more visible signs around, maybe an arrow pointing down.”
Participant 2 Some participants used the RFID box as a place to rest items while using the scan gun, which added them to the basket twice. They then matched product codes on screen against the items to remove the duplicates.
Hard tags are easy, but slow
3 of 5 participants took over a minute
“If I have more than 5 items, it’s a real job!”
Participant 5 Even first-time users removed hard tags successfully. Finding the tag was the hard part, and hidden tags took much longer. Customers with bigger baskets worried about holding up the queue.
Secondary actions barely registered
4 of 5 participants made little or no reference to them
“I don’t notice the options, they’re too small. I just see the two in the middle.”
Participant 5 Secondary actions weren’t part of the core journey, though participants said they might use them if they were easier to see.
Every self-checkout feels the same
“I use Carrefour’s all the time. Max’s screens are bigger, so that’s a plus.”
Participant 1 Carrefour was the closest comparison for most participants, but apart from screen size they struggled to tell the experiences apart.
What we recommended
Most of our recommendations focused on RFID, from how customers hear about it to how the scanner looks and responds. Each one went into the backlog with the teams that owned it.
RFID education
POS and Clientele
On-screen tutorials at the SSCO, and short explainers on the big screens behind the tills, where customers wait in the queue.
RFID communication
Marketing, POS and Clientele
Educational pieces about RFID on social media and in customer communications.
RFID physical design
Concepts, POS and Clientele
A scanner that shows what it does and confirms when items are read, branding on the box, and a warning on screen when items are duplicated.
Secondary actions
POS and Clientele
Test again with larger buttons, backed by usage analytics, to decide whether they should stay at all.
Product removal
POS and Clientele
Product images in the on-screen basket, so customers can tell items apart without matching codes.
Looking outward
Later that year, we benchmarked the self-checkouts at Inditex (Zara’s parent company), Uniqlo, and Azorte to see how the best in fashion retail handle the same problems. Three principles ran through all of them:
- End-to-end guidance: customers are helped at every step, from signage on the way in to instructions on screen.
- Controlled and progressive: the system leads customers through one step at a time and handles the important actions itself, which also reduces shrinkage.
- Quick and intuitive: the journey is simple enough that there is almost nothing to learn.
| Practice | Inditex | Uniqlo | Azorte | Landmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-checkout area that’s hard to miss | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partly |
| Visual instructions on screen and fixture | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| One way to build a basket | Yes | Not covered | Not covered | No |
| Mostly soft tags | Yes | Not covered | Not covered | No |
| Scan first to link a membership | Yes | Yes | Not covered | No |
| Focused screens with restrained colour | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Inditex showed how far this can go. Its journey has a single starting point: put your items in the RFID box. Animated instructions leave no room for interpretation, soft tags have all but removed the need to take off hard tags, and the flow runs in a fixed order, from payment to tag removal to receipt, so nothing gets missed.
Where we fell short
Set against the benchmark, our own self-checkout journey had clear gaps.
Customers were left to work it out
There was little guidance anywhere in the journey, and no instructional visuals, so customers had to figure out each step for themselves.
Opportunity · Clear, visual instructions on screen and on the fixture, as every competitor we studied provides.
Two ways to build a basket
Supporting both the scan gun and RFID gave the journey several branching paths. It was harder to navigate, harder to maintain, and its entry points behaved inconsistently.
Opportunity · A single, RFID-first way to start, as Inditex has.
Hard tags slowed bigger baskets
Hard tags remained our main defence against shrinkage, but removing them took over a minute for most participants, and customers with bigger baskets felt discouraged.
Opportunity · Move towards soft tags, and only call out the items that still need a tag removed.
Self-checkout was easy to miss
Some stores had clear signage for their SSCO areas, while others did little to make them visible or inviting.
Opportunity · Consistent in-store signage, plus promotion through visual collateral and Max’s in-store radio.
Membership linking added friction
Scanning a Shukran card and typing a number were given equal weight, and the benefits of linking were never explained, so only dedicated customers bothered.
Opportunity · Lead with scanning, and say why linking is worth it.
Screens that lacked focus
Heavy use of colour pulled attention in every direction, and the NPS survey appeared before the receipt, so customers who skipped it could miss their receipt.
Opportunity · Reserve colour for the next step, and ask for feedback after the receipt.
Reflection
We went in to tidy up a screen and came out with a lesson about adoption. RFID was the quickest way to check out by far, but only for people who knew it was there and trusted how it worked. Everything around it, from signage and the shape of the scanner to the instructions on screen, decided whether customers ever got to feel that speed.
Letting the research change course was the right call. Had we stuck to secondary actions, we would have polished a part of the screen that customers barely looked at. And benchmarking afterwards gave our findings weight: the retailers doing self-checkout well had already made the choices our participants were asking for.