Exercise 2 - State of the Art Analysis (Information in the Metro) - Per

I have analyzed the information that is availiable in the metro. Especially at the station T-Centralen where we also conducted interviews with staff at the information desk and the SL-center.

When talking to Denise Mediri in the SL-center she told us that the maps that were placed above the ticket vending machines were causing problems because it's hard to understand the Zone system when looking at it. As you can see from the picture below there is both the A, B, C in the top row as well as placed within the map. According to Denise, this is the reason why a lot of people come to her in the SL-center, just because they can’t read the map. Also, the commuter train-lines were not easy to follow since they all had the same color (grey).

When we later arrived to the Info desk outside the ticket gates, we spoke to Peter Lundkvist who said that they had just installed new map signs at the ticket booths where he stood. They looked like this:

As you can see from the pictures, the coordinate system and the contradictory letters are now gone. The commuter train lines are now in different colors to more easily differentiate between them.

Another aspect of the information in the metro is in what languages are available. All old signs were only in English and Swedish. The only place to get information in other languages was in the brochures that you could find at the SL-center. The languages available in the brochures were Russian, Finnish, German, French and Spanish. When speaking to Denise in the info center, she told us about how she recently had problems, because she couldn’t help an Italian speaking person.

A big change now though is that one of the new signs they are starting to put up will be by the ticket vending machines which has information in the same languages as mentioned above. While that is a step in the right direction, there is still a lot to improve.

Another issue that Peter Lundkvist told us about was that if a tourist comes to another station than T-Centralen as their first station. The possibilities to get proper information would be harder. I think, a new interface in the ticket machine could help this problem. Adding extra languages in the interface wouldn’t be a hard thing to do. Then you wouldn’t have to keep brochures and updating signs allt the time.