Example System: Gas-Cash-Dash

The example system being designed is point-of-sale system for use at gas stations. Many gas stations now use pay-at-the-pump systems that allow customers to buy gas using their credit or debt cards. In this demonstration we consider a hypothetical system, named Gas-Cash-Dash, that sells gas, sells lottery tickets, redemes some winning tickets, and dispenses cash (like an ATM).

The system's basic functionallity should be usable by first time customers, the number of steps in the dialog should be kept fairly short, and customer time should be minimized to increase the number of customers served during busy periods. The design also needs to consider some security issues, however those are not the focus of this example.

We explore the requirements and design of the user interface of the next section.