Oh, drive-through ATMs! How I dread them. Often, they're designed for an SUV or a truck, hardly ever for a sedan or coupe. Only at a few select ATMs have I managed to operate the machine sitting in my car, without having to open the door and remove my seat-belt.
One of the specific problems caused by the height differential between different classes of users (SUV drivers versus sedan drivers) is a type of parallax error with non-touch-screen ATMs — the ones lined on both sides with buttons that map to certain actions on the screen.
As in the figure above, the buttons are not at the same level as the screen, they usually jut out a few inches. So, when an SUV driver looks at it, each button maps to a spot slightly lower than when a sedan driver looks at it. I've often clicked the wrong button because of this.
As with most unusable designs, there is an attempt to apply a band-aid over the real problem. In this case, it shows up as 8 parallel lines drawn from the buttons to the screen. They don't help much, but simply illustrate that the designers have at least realized that this is a problem.
