Ticket Machine Blues

Yesterday I missed my train. I could blame myself for not leaving more time. I could blame my own meanness for not parking in the station car-park, still charging a flat  £5.30 at 3:30 in the afternoon when a town car park a 5 minute walk away charged £1 for the two hours I needed. I could even blame my own stupidity for not realising that the booking office was in fact open if I had entered the station from the opposite side. Most of all though I blame the fact that the platform-side ticket machine was in full sunlight. Its display could barely be read and the family in front of me wasted all the time remaining repeatedly having to start again when they pressed the wrong button. They gave up in the end but by that time it was too late. I could see what the problem was instantly when I made the same mistake. The button that appeared in the sunlight to be confirming the station selected was in fact asking you if you wanted to depart from a different station. No wonder they were confused.

Not only do ticket machines at out of town stations needed to be located better, they also need to be more plentiful. At my nearest station, not the one I used yesterday, there is only one, similarly sited with the same problems in the afternoon sunshine. I could have bought my ticket in advance and collected it from the machine but I'd still have had the same usability problem. We live outside the Oyster card zone so using such ticket machines for spur of the moment journeys is the only option when the booking office is closed.

I first looked at the usability problem of forecourt ticket machines a couple of years ago as part of a Human Computer interface project, so I'd be the first to admit that creating a more usable interface is not an easy task.  Smartcard ticketing may be the answer but not everyone will opt for this. A redesign of the machines to incorporate a barcode reader to read a mobile phone display so prepaid tickets could be collected with the press of one button would have solved yesterday's problem though.  Surely that can't be so difficult?