Passenger Focus

Research here in the UK suggests that too many passengers are left standing in ticket queues while ticket machines remain unused. Passenger Focus found that travellers familiar with ticket machines are not always confident when making complex or less-familiar journeys and need help from staff. Often this is because ticket restrictions are not displayed clearly on ticket machines. Passengers may avoid the machines or give up, queue at the ticket office and risk missing their train. Are we in the kiosk industry letting down our customers? Surely, we can do better than this!

Even I - someone who has worked with public access systems for over ten years - have been intimidated by ticket machines - a bewildering array of buttons and choices to make. Bad enough at the best of times but, when you’re in a hurry to catch a train, very stressful.

It should be possible by now to have intelligent software delivered through kiosks that have been designed to be easy to use when time is of the essence. The software should be able to select the best fair options for the destination and time of day and the dialogue with the user should be ultra-simple. It should know which trains are due to leave shortly and offer these first as fast-track options. The first screen could even be displayed as a touch-sensitive destination board - with platform and departure time information displayed. When the user selects a train, the destination and pricing options could be listed next. That’s just two touches to get to the point where you need to pay. How difficult is that?

Now, I know that ticket pricing is far more complex than that, but I do feel that some in this industry have forgotten about the end-users’ needs in difficult circumstances.

21 July 2010