Ticket machines are one of my most interesting personal challenges. It started years ago when I analysed and and made suggestions for Milan’s newly rebuilt ticketing system. Updating my suggestions when I came across other systems trying to manage the same problem (Tokyo, London, Lisbon, …).
The Design Team received a request from our Australian HQ asking whether we’d be interested in trying to solve the current issues with the Sydney ticketing system by means of a Design by Example session. Here’s a photo of the current ticketing machine:
Photo by David Morgan-Mar
This isn’t a simple problem, because different cities may have different needs. It is also a problem that’s tied strongly to the primary revenue streams of the transportation company. In many cases, it would be simpler to create a single tariff, but this is often unrealistic due to costs. The design solution here might be limited to the redesign of the ticketing machine, but could also involve a total service redesign.
So, how would you design a ticketing machine?
Some relevant points:
- It needs to physically durable
- It needs to be as cheap as possible to implement and maintain
- It’s better if it can be integrated into the existing system
- Should allow all tickets types: one way, return, weekly, monthly, etc.
- Should allow top-up of cards
- Should allow payments in cash, bills or credit cards.
If you want to try this week’s example, do your design now (no more than 10 minutes, remember) and then go on reading.
As you might imagine this session created a bit of discomfort due to it’s broad nature and restricted time limit, however, here are some of the relevant points we discussed:
Affordability
Cost isn’t primary information, because the primary need is to get somewhere and you’ll probably still do that regardless of expense ‘You pay because you want to go there’.
That said, there could be a button to toggle between quick and affordable journeys. An interesting interaction for the people that want to limit their outgoings.
Touchscreens
Are a very popular choice thanks to recent innovations. Although they allow excellent interfaces, there may need to be a compromise between sustainability and cost.
Smartphones
could make the process easier, even more so if the phone has a NFC chip (unfortunately still quite rare). But even without that, a simple barcode scanner could process the transaction and give the ticket in a couple of seconds.
Pre-booked and on the spot journeys
A drastic approach could be to keep the current infrastructure but limit the queues. Automatic ticket machines could dispense pre-sold tickets, while those who have not planned their journey would queue up at a till. While a drastic idea, it is also an interesting exploration which attempts to address two groups of users, the experienced and inexperienced.
Speech Recognition
Why not just buy the tickets with your voice? Yes, the environment could be noisy, but with a follow-up on-screen selection this could be the quickest choice ever.
Autocorrect
Why shouldn’t the machine correct any spelling error I make in typing the station name?
Also, a very interesting discussion started when we compared a linguistic approach and a visuospatial approach: the first group will know the place name, but not the location geographically, while the second group will know the location, but not the exact name. This will require two very different approaches to the interface design.
Tourism
A way to consult points of interest into the interface was discussed, but discarded. As it could potentially cause longer queues to a system that should efficient.
Another possible feature is a tourist button which opens a dedicated experience. This would help tourists in getting the best possible tickets for their needs.
Language is also a strong requirement for any city, especially one which attracts tourists.
As you can see, there are many possible improvements, most of which require some sort of compromise with the scale and costs of the whole systems. This is probably why 100+ button interfaces like the one in Sydney are still common, but that doesn’t mean we should be limited to these machines.
Another very interesting element of the whole experience which is often overlooked is the turnstile. In my opinion, Tokyo does a really great job here, because their turnstiles are open by default instead of being closed, but… they close if you don’t put the ticket in as opposed to putting the ticket in and then opening. This almost eliminates queueing altogether.
