Another unnecessarily confusing interface

I checked in for a flight last week using a self-serve kiosk. When I first approached it said "Touch screen to begin," so I poked the screen. It beeped and displayed a second screen that said something like "Choose an option" and listed five methods for identifying myself—swipe a credit card, swipe my passport, scan a printed boarding pass, and two others I can't remember. Each of the five options was displayed inside a large square box that looked like a button or a three dimensional frame. I wanted to use my passport so I poked the screen inside the passport area. The screen beeped and nothing happened. I assumed it was just slow. I waited but still nothing happened. I poked the screen again. Nothing. I poked it again. Still nothing.

Eventually I decided to try swiping my passport. I opened it up and found a bar code type area and swiped that, but it didn't work. I swiped it a couple more times, varying the speed and direction, but still nothing.

I poked the screen again. Beep, and then nothing.

I studied the picture inside the button more closely and tried to orient my passport the same way as in the picture, and swiped it again. Finally the machine recognized my passport and a new screen was displayed. From there things went smoothly.

But that was needlessly frustrating. Why make the options look like targets if I wasn't supposed to touch them? Why hide the list of options behind a "Touch screen to begin" page, priming me with the idea that I interact with this device by poking the screen, instead of just listing the options on the front screen so I can swipe my passport before interacting with the screen? It was like the interface was designed to lead me astray.

Perhaps the best redesign would be to go with the perceived affordance of touching the option you want to use, and show a second page saying "Swipe your passport in the slot above." Then there would be enough room to show a video of a passport being swiped and a picture calling out the part of the passport that the machine wanted to read, so I wouldn't have had to try to guess from a tiny iconograph how I was supposed to do the swiping.