Ticket to ride. Just.

The examination of what makes for a good user experience is absolutely vital, and as you’ve probably gathered, I – like many others – think we ‘providers of tech’ often get basics wrong. In fact, depressingly, web/tech products seem to get things wrong more often than they get them right.

In order for this wrongness to happen, one of two things must have been an issue during the project process:

1) Belief that the end user isn’t terribly important
2) A ‘project interface’ issue – a gap in expertise between various departments or a (perceived) lack of cash or time.

It is nearly impossible to believe that the first is true – that project teams put together end-user tech without considering end-user needs. Sadly though, for one reason or another – usually IT teams thinking the technology is *everything* (“it’s really cool the way we’ve interfaced the Z60 box and the AR39 switcher. Besides, *I* understand the user interface so why won’t Dawn in Accounts…?”) – it does happen.

Gaps in project expertise are related but different, and easier to understand. Typically this occurs between designer and techy: each assumes the other is responsible for usability (or just ‘the user’) and in the end it turns out that neither focuses on this, the most crucial part of the product.

Now’s the time to bring in a real-world example. I buy my tickets for London on thetrainline.com for delivery to a ‘fast ticket’ machine at Bath Spa, as I do every week. The tech between the website and ticket machine is enormously impressive: a timetable lookup, a credit card transaction, a central database of bookings networked to any station around the country. Nice, and my thoughts go out to the poor people who had to do it.

So why is it that when I arrive at the (newly designed) ticket machine, I can’t see how to collect my ticket? There’s lots of station names, and a few other buttons, but nothing that tells me where my ticket actually is.

In the end I, like many frustrated users in front of bad UI’s both on- and off-line, start pushing random buttons. Eventually I try one that says ‘Tickets on Departure’. It works.

Sorry? What? Pardon?

‘Tickets on Departure’…..?

Not:
– ‘Prepaid tickets, press here’
– ‘Bought online?’
– ‘Pre-ordered tickets’
– ‘Collect your tickets’
– ‘Ticket collection’
– ‘Fast ticket collection’

…or any other sensible, obvious, meaningful choice of words. ‘Tickets on Departure’…

There’s some other badness going on – a touchscreen keyboard that isn’t arranged in QWERTY layout and the phrase ‘print journey’ rather than ‘print ticket’, but ‘Tickets on Departure’ is horribly bad. Crucially, it’s also right at the beginning of the process: your commitment is low, and peer pressure (the crowd building and tutting under their breath behind you) is high. Your natural response when that button isn’t right there in your face? Abort the tech and go ask a man instead.

I stood for a few minutes and watched other people with the machine. It turns out I’m not alone – the majority gave up, some asked a member of staff (who looked like he’d been asked before..). A couple pushed the last button remaining to them, as I had, and battled through.

Now I’m not big on mainframe stuff but the infrastructure required to do all that on/off-line talking feels to me like maybe 5 million quid, minimum? I’d imagine each ticket machine is probably £30k.

Seems a shame, doesn’t it? All that effort and money culminating in a crap UI which frustrates the very people it’s apparently built for.

Tell you what, I might see what I can find out about the project process in building these particular machines, and I’ll then post about what (if anything) I find…

3 thoughts on “Ticket to ride. Just.”

  1. Never tried that but I have issues with the Trainline site. Maybe I’m being dumb, but then I’m just a user so that should be expected, but it’s the favourite journeys that gets on my wick. You should be able to look at your account details, see your saved journeys listed, and use them but no. There is a route, but My account won’t get you there.
    What happens? If you click the “My account” tab, it opens in a new window to log you in. Why a new window? Once logged in, you cannot access anything on the site (even the logo doesn’t link to the main trainline site), only your account details, so you can change your profile but not buy a ticket, although you’re logged in. There’s a “back” link, which takes you back to the login form, and the option of adding, editing and saving journeys – but not using them. There is a link by the dropdown saying “use this favourite journey” but it doesn’t let you use it: it’s the form submission to select the journey you want to edit. ARRGHH!!!. And of course, since “My account” opened in a new window you can’t use the fact that you’re logged in in the original window.

    The right route is to click the log in link low in the left column, which opens a different login page to the My Account link. Why is it different? This link at least opens in the same window, so that you can benefit from the fact that you’re logged in, if you’ve already put together a journey you want. Login form submission is a text link, not a button. Why? Once logged in you see the usual search form and a list of saved journeys. Hooray! in this instance “Use favourite journey” DOES mean use it. Though you can’t edit it… And still, there’s no link to the home page except right at the bottom of the page. Of course, if you click it you can’t get back to your personal search page, you’d have to log in again. Naturally, you might be tempted to use the My Account link, but we know about that already, don’t we?
    In writing and rewriting this I’ve cleared up some of my own queries about how to use that damn site, which is good – but it shouldn’t be necessary, should it? I think what it comes down to is that they shouldn’t have two routes to log in, and they shouldn’t open one in a new window (which forces you to log in again). It’s easy, really. But christ, they make it counter-intuitive.

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  2. Oh yeah, don’t get me started on thetrainline site. The moment when I fell out with it big-time was the default “insure your journey” checkbox. Luckily they seem to have removed this now, undoubtedly because of the volume of complaints…

    But yeah, all the login stuff is very mysterious – it almost feels like it should be quite useful but then isn’t because of the issues you outline above.

    Oh well..

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