With the days of the full-service gas station attendant nearly extinct in my home state, I've essentially been pumping my own petrol since I could drive a car. And over the course of those many years, technology has obviously changed to meet the needs of the "pay-at-the-pump" customer.

I've also been in the digital/interactive industry for the past fifteen years, and just from being immersed in that world I often relate to everyday things in a way others who aren't in the industry do not. It may not be very deep, but I notice stuff (and tilt my head a lot).

Which brings me to my gas pump user-experience ("UX" to those in the interactive biz). At a local station that I visit regularly, I observed that a couple of the selection buttons on the pump seemed rather counter-intuitive, essentially because of the color of the buttons.

To be fair, on those buttons are two very simple elementary-school-reading-level words –in ALL CAPS, no less– to help properly instruct my selection. But for as long as I can remember (or at least since I've been playing "Red Light Green Light"), the color red has been associated with "stop/no/don't". Add to this my professional presuppositions regarding the correlation between colors and calls-to-action, and the pump certainly seems to have disregarded some basic best practices.

So as the fuel gurgled into my vehicle's tank, I thought to myself (and as the owner of a Chevrolet Suburban I had some time): I wonder how many customers incorrectly press –or at minimum pause for a few seconds before pressing– the gas pump buttons due to the color? Are those precious seconds calculable to those who study such behaviors? Could those metrics be made available to the manufacturers of the pumps? Would an A|B test (see my Photoshop hack-job image above) be of any value to those who strive for optimum gas pump UX?

I apologize if the previous paragraph makes me sound like I went to the Andy Rooney School of Ponderings. But nearly every time I pump gas at this particular filling station, there's a brief yet discernible hesitation on my part before I select the intended button. So I'm either on to something, or I just can't get seem to get past something else.

As I said earlier, not very deep (as I tilt my head).

(P.S. For old-schoolers who enjoy listening to scratchy 45's in majestic monophonic sound and/or watching black & white movies in un-restored grainy glory, here's a feel-good story spotlighting a full-service filling station currently operating in Kankakee, IL: "Mike's Corner Shell")

(This article originally written in November 2015)