We have done physical interfaces on the subway, namely the ticket machines located in the ticket halls. We searched for the minimal information that the display must show to be helpful. His main focus has been on the physical appearance of the machine, for instance the color theme, or how the instructions on the side of the main display is perceived for a first time users. We have also discussed a different layout for the system - rather than displaying all information at once, which can be overwhelming for a tourist, maybe it would be better to display questions that a user can select, based on what a user usually wants to know. These questions would be found out empirically. For instance, maybe a user has a cost related question in mind, and doesn’t want to read the instructions on how to buy a ticket before reading the instructions on how to find the prices. Then the user would be better off pressing “How much does it cost to go to X?” or something similar. This saves time for the tourist and enables the ticket booth personnel to focus on his/hers core business. Lastly we discussed the translation abilities of the machine itself. Right now only English and Swedish are available. We do not think this takes into consideration the variety of different tourists taking the subway, for example for a tourist not born in the anglosphere this would become a difficulty.
Even though the mobile apps came in handy when it came to understanding which zones a tourist were going to cross. Even though the app was available in several different languages, we could see that its target group is people from Sweden. This is obvious in two ways. First, a user needs to either have access to roaming or free wifi in order to use the app. Second, a user needs to have a Swedish phone operator to buy a ticket. Many tourists don't have access to roaming and free wifi are not available at the subway stations. From this state of the art analysis we can draw the conclusion that the app is not especially useful for tourists.
SL:s website has two relevant tabs for tourists. In the tab called “Start” you can enter the two stations you are going to travel between, and here you will see the timestamps, subway train number, ticket prizes and alert messages of the journey. The design is quite simple, but can be made even more simple if we take the good design concept from it and remove the “extra” information and then shift the focus to buying tickets and applicate it on the ticket machines. For example, a bad thing about the website was the part of the information that was displayed in Swedish, even though a user was using the English version of the website.
In the other tab on their English website you could see information about different price categories. There’s several different ticket types and four different prices depending on your age or if you are a student. The information is quite overwhelming due to SL’s complicated system and it can most likely be explained easier by categorizing the output differently. This is very important later for our design of the machines. Here it is paramount that it should be easy to find the information one needs.
We were inspired by the website and thought of a new design idea. Perhaps it should be made possible to first get the options “Single ticket” and “Period tickets” from the ticket machines. From the “Single ticket” option there could be a design similar to the one in the “Start” tab, but focused on buying tickets instead of showing travel information. Here it should be possible to buy zone-tickets, maybe just with SL Access Cards if we make it possible to purchase a card ticket from the machine. In the other option one could get longer term tickets like “Period tickets” and “Student tickets”. We must also make the different pricings for different ages be very clear.
We have also analysed the physical signs of information. Many people seems to think that the maps are difficult to understand - for example the letter A both indicates the zones of the map, but is also a part of a two-dimensional grid that covers the map. This has been somewhat mitigated in some stations by putting different color schemes on maps, but this has currently been done only in a few places.
From a linguistic perspective, it seems to be difficult to find travel brochures in any language other than English and Swedish, which is similar to the ticket machine translation limitation. If you want a brochure you have to go to the info-center and fetch one. The languages supported today Russian, Finnish, German, French and Spanish. We spoke to an information booth personnel who told us a story about an Italian tourist that got no help whatsoever from the public information. Furthermore, he told us that the ability to find information subsided the farther away one went from T-Centralen. Often there are no information booths in remote stations.
We also spoke to travel bureaus and asked them about their situation, for example how they helped the tourists, which material they handed to tourists, if they helped tourists to buy tickets to travel around in Stockholm, etc. From this source of input, the answer was overwhelmingly simple: No tourists has ever came back for more assistance - every tourist that has visited them seemingly knew how to travel using the subway without any major assistance. We suspect this to be a bit of a marketing trick since no serious travel bureau would admit that they lack the ability to provide full service to their customers. Although this was the answer the got, the empirical evidence gathered from our interviewed points in another direction. Hence, we can obviously see that many tourists had issues with navigating, purchasing tickets or getting other useful information in the subway.
Lastly, after analyzing the ticket system in Germany we clearly see some big differences in its approach to the customer. The German system uses big buttons with clear messages and when you select “Buy ticket”, you are prompted to write your destination. This stands in contrast to the Swedish system where it’s hard to understand where to press on the screen to begin with. As we mentioned earlier, you are also given too many options of different tickets. We like the reverse approach, that is to ask the customer for something that they know. This is similar to the situation we talked about earlier when we suggested to show questions to users. In most cases they know where to go so when they enter their destination, we then give them all the details, like zones, prices and ticket options. We will further investigate the German system and try to implement some of their perks into our new product.
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