In this project, a couple of forces met in a very harmonious way, which led to some spot-on research in design and interaction. Although it didn’t end up being implemented in the actual ticket machines that made their way into buses and trams, there’s value here to be referenced at a later time, I suppose.
The team I had put together and led was comprised, as usual, of the Kindergarten’s inner core of awesome: Ioana Galie, Oana Popovici and Tania Ignat. Essentially, what we were doing was studying the “ticket-validation-interaction”, its manifestations and paraphernalia, its problems and solutions.
The first step was to look at ticket validators around the world, and see what they had gotten right or wrong, and why. We categorized “good”, “bad” and “ugly”, and a whole lot in between. Here are some of them, plus our comments:
Tiny, unreadable displays on some of them, placed at impossible angles. Some of them had arrows painted over to let people know where to put the ticket and how. To us, needing to draw an arrow on your device represented the utmost possible design fail. Lots of buttons for no reason, and confusing feedback on validation only made things worse for some of our case studies. Then there were the “almost right” ones, that clearly represented the work of some designer, but still had some rough edges in our humble opinion.
We were also considering, in our study, the economy of means – the fanciest didn’t necessarily mean the best. At one point we were hinted by the contractors to integrate touch-screens, but we advised against it. Good design, we believe, doesn’t mean piling on shiny tech, it means responding to people’s needs in the simplest and most natural way. This is why our favourite model was, in fact, over 50 years old:
The really efficient part of this design was that, in its simplicity, it employed very basic and sturdy mechanisms, but the real gem was the interaction. First of all, you validate by shoving the ticket in vertically. Considering that most of these were mounted at adult chest-level, and some a bit lower, everyone had a good line of sight to the slit, from above. That is the easiest, most natural way to do it, eye and hand working in coordination without needing to slouch, bend or look under anything. It also means that when you hold the ticket between your thumb and index finger to shove it in, your palm rests comfortably on the device (there is no display to be covered by that action) and provides a stable point to lean on if the vehicle starts or stops abruptly. Then, the actual validation action is possible by moving only those two fingers back and forth, in a controlled, mechanical feedback rich motion. This design was cheap, sturdy, and it stuck around for dozens of years until becoming out-of-date. Which is why a lot of inspiration stemmed from it.
Our device was going to have two variants, one for tickets and one for RFID (plus one that covered both ways). For RFID cards, the natural motion is to held it in your palm, like a badge, and lean in on a vertical receiving point, without obscuring the display. Some of the devices we’d studied, that used RFID, had buttons and indicators for multiple validation (if you are in group using one single card). Instead of numbers, we used “people icons” and +/- buttons, color coded. Another yellow button, the “i” was used to consult your remaining credit on the card or other such tasks.
One important part of our study revolved around the feedback – in a moving public transport vehicle, everyone is sensory-challenged. It’s a loud, inconstantly-lit, push-and-shove medium, so such a device has to convey its messages in as many ways possible. That means tactile, luminous, acoustic. We had lights that lit up in an “airstrip” fashion, towards the slot, and flashing brightly away from it once validation occurred. Sound had to be employed as well, that loud satisfying chime that everyone likes, and a vibrating feedback to cover tactile response.
Since the project was unfortunately cut short and scrapped, we didn’t get to fully develop the shape, and didn’t get to the second part of the design, where we wanted to play with the shape-aesthetics of the modern bus. The analogy we were really excited about was between the interior of the transportation system and a forest.
In the “thoughts for later” category, we played around with the way people perceive cleanliness. Public transport ranks high in an “eww” factor, even though the companies in charge of it make ungodly efforts to have them squeaky clean at all times. Nobody considers forests “dirty” and we set to find out why. But that is a story for another post, one that will hopefully soon follow.
Design is Bravery 