Exercise 2 - State of the art review and thoughts - Morgan

State of the art review and thoughts

First some  thoughts from our first two interviews with the staff of SL.

They get a lot of questions in the  ticket booth from people who don’t even stop to try and buy a ticket from the ticket-machines. I think a big reason for this is that the first impression you get from these ticket-machines is very negative, it feels like a wall of information and difficult train-maps. Since they have to explain not only the different lines and its zones, they try to explain how the machine works and all this in several languages which makes this machine look like chaos.

Of course any tourist will turn to the ticket booth when it is like this, we need to change the appearance to attract more users. And also all this info can be integrated into the steps when buying a ticket, just by asking for their destination you have eliminated the problem that they need to manually find their destination in the spiderweb of green, red and blue lines and also then know what zone it is.

State of the art review

I have lived in Germany for a while and I found their subway ticket system to have certain advantages. So I will focus this state of the art review on the ticket system in Germany. I have asked a friend who lives there to take pictures on the different steps so that I and later also the group can analyze its procedure.

I have collected all the steps from seeing the machine, interacting and finally paying for a ticket. The person who did these steps had a clear destination in mind and I think this is often the case when it comes to our target group. They usually have a tourist attraction to go to or they are simply heading back to the hotell or airport. In these cases it is very straight forward. See picture 1.

Picture 1 - Steps on buying a ticket at the german subway station.

The machine itself is very clean, no information glued onto it, just a bright red color that attracts attention and the message “tickets”. The first view that is exposed to the costumer is a selection of options where focus is on “Where to travel”. You can easily click another language and there also options to search and print travel itinerary.

Once you press the button ”Where to travel” it gives you the two options from where and destination, the from field is already filled with the current station, although you may change this if you plan a different trip. When pressing the field ”Destination” you directly get a keyboard and also a couple of quick choices (big stations which is commonly traveled to). Once starting to tap the letters to your destination it filters out  the letters so it knows exactly what stations is in the system and it wont let you write something wrong. When you have pressed enough words it will automatically give you all the options of stations that started on your letters.

After this you can choose different routes depending on prices and preferred routes. In the end you can choose to pay single-tickets or other ticket offers that may save you some money depending if you are doing a return trip or a group trip etc. Then you pay! And it prints out your ticket which needs to be brought with you the whole trip.

I also made a quick interview with my contact to hear what she thought about their system. She found that it is easy although old people still have problems to buy like the cheapest ticket you could get, as an example, when you’re two old ladies you should buy a "4 rides ticket” rather than buying two single return tickets.

She likes that they offer very cheap group tickets and it is good that you type in the name of your station and it gives you choices almost right away instead of needing to type in the whole name, which saves you time. However often times the machines don't take your big euro notes, probably because of the lack of change. And if they do take your big euro notes it takes a long time to process it.

/Morgan