Exercise 2 - State of the art analysis - Edwin Li

I've chosen to base my study on the ticket machines which are located in the ticket halls on each station in the subway. Since our idea is about creating an interface for tourists that are travelling by the subway, I figured it'd be a good idea to get some inspiration from the existing ticket machines. This is the purpose of the state-of-the-art, that is, getting to know the general development of the subject. This is important because we won't be risking reinventing the wheel, and as an added bonus we'll get inspiration as well. More specifically I could then easily find out the minimal necessary information that a machine must display. Today there is roughly one machine per ticket hall, with the exception of large stations like T-Centralen. A ticket machine consists of a touch-screen display, and a 1.5 m x 1.5 m map which was glued on a board above the display. In all other directions of the display, there were stickers with instructions on how to press the buttons. Below you will see parts of the instructions.

Instructions displaying
time information

Instructions on how to purchase a ticket

The most obvious theme is the colors blue and white - colors that are supposed to be pleasant for the eyes and that matches the SL logo. I think this is intentional and well thought-out and not something I should focus on. However a user could be shocked by the sheer amount of text that is shown around the display, especially first time users. This is very similar to the parking booth that we were shown on a lecture - lots of confusing information that are fed to a user that is more likely to perplex a user than to help her.

I think a tourist would go to the machine with a question in mind, for instance "How much do I have to pay to go to station X?". I also believe that most of the tourists have the same kinds of questions (this will be analysed empirically), so wouldn't it be better to show what is relevant for a question that the user can pick from a list instead of throwing all information at the user's face all at once? With this approach the workers in the ticket booth can focus more on their business, while the tourist can save the time she'd usually waste by standing in queue asking the question that has already been asked infinite amount of times before.

As mentioned above, I imagine it would be easier to present the questions from a list, like the picture below. The options should be based on the questions that statistically are the most likely to be asked, without compromising the basic functions like buying tickets or filling the travel funds. 

The questions could be shown like this

Lastly I have noticed that the machines only speak two languages - Swedish and English. For a tourist that doesn't origin from a place within the anglosphere this will be a problem, both for the tourist and the ticket booth personnel. A study should be conducted to find out the most common languages spoken by tourists in Stockholm, and the translations should be adapted to this. For example, Russian, Chinese and German are common tongues spoken by tourists in Stockholm.