I bring my own bag. The first time I tried to use one of these things, I scanned and dropped the object in my bag. Very tired after a late night at work, I went through some trial and error to make out that the machine/designers did not consider MY bagging area to be THE bagging area. Then I had to use trial and error to figure what portion of the unmarked, monotonously gray and brown surroundings (a litle piece of the world populated by flat surfaces at several levels, crowds of candy bars and magazines, and a hoarde of cranky people squeezing past with children running up and down, and never an employee in sight) might actually qualify as THE “bagging area.”

The directions would have have been much clearer had they included something like this:
1. Find the bar code on each item that you wish to purchase.
2. Hold the bar code of one item two to six inches in front of, and facing, the red screen until a light flashes. This scans the item.
3. Place the item in the large blue rectangle on the counter to your right. This resets the scanner.

Providing such poor instructions and such non-intuitive processes that every individual must use logical analysis to figure out how to work every piece of technology he/she comes across is an enormous, and enormously frustrating, waste of time.

In this case if you scan your item and place it in the bagging area, the system prepares for the next item; if not, not so much. My wife, who will admit she doesn’t get along with machines, finds it quite easy to work with, even though she thinks they should redesign the machine to be more human friendly.

Nonetheless, the ability to test, observe, and appropriately alter one’s behavior seems to me to employ logic.

Agree with the conclusion. Basic logic is a useful thing to wrap your head round at an early age.

Disagree with the example. When I try to understand how a machine works, I’m not using logic per se. What I’m doing is trying to empathise with the machine’s designers. I have to figure out what behaviour they were expecting from their users, and then behave like that. Then the machine usually works.

Different design communities expect different behaviours from their users – it’s a cultural thing. I’d say the problem in your example is that the customers don’t have sufficient experience of hardware/software designers, and of what these folks consider to be normal user behaviour.

So the way to solve this problem isn’t to give people training in basic logic, however cool an idea that might be. It’s to give people training in basic user interface design. That would be quite challenging given that these people have little knowledge of the underlying technology, but it might be possible.