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?

Monitoring of web traffic on an online banking site. Risk or legitimate data collection?

LloydsTSB has redesigned its online banking service web site and I tried this out for the first time yesterday. The site, as well as displaying statements with the newest transaction at the top, claimed to have introduced new features which would make it easier for the user, but my own first impressions were far from favourable.

For a start there was a new quick payments page. They had provided a drop-down list of the recipients I had already set up. Paying one or more of these just entailed making a selection from the list and then choosing the amount and confirming the password as before. A link then enabled me to return to the same page to make another payment if I wished. Initially I assumed that this drop-down list had replaced the previous page of links and since it didn't include a reference number, though unhelpfully did include an 8 zero account number for credit card companies, I had an immediate problem as I had more than one account with the same institution. These had the same sort code and zeros account number. There was no way to distinguish between the two without the reference.

After a 10 minute wait on the online banking telephone helpline I was told that the old payments page could still be reached and I could make my payment there. This was true but there was no link back to it, so the process was going to take longer than before for multiple payments. This was supposed to be an improvement? Additionally the make payment and delete recipient buttons were very close together on different lines and I could see that deleting a recipient by mistake would be all too easy.

I've focused so far on usability, but a far more serious issue for me was the fact that the site momentarily redirected to statse.webtrendslive.com en-route to each new page. I eventually discovered that LloydsTSB are collecting marketing information in this way, but not until after I had wasted a considerable amount of time talking to technicians at an anti-virus software provider. They weren't knowledgeable enough and wanted to solve a non-existent virus problem with a sledge hammer approach. I'm always wary about researching viruses on the net as malicious sites can themselves introduce viruses whilst purporting to offer software to remove them. I did find discussions of webtrendslive on various forums though and once I had realised what was happening it was easy enough to block it using a Firefox add-on.

It's a shame that when asked, LloydsTSB's helpdesk staff only said that the presence of webtrendslive in the status bar was part of the workings of their website and didn't confess it was a 3rd party site. This kind of redirect is not what you expect in online banking and doesn't lead to confidence in the security of the site. When I also explained the usability problems the new site was causing, the helpdesk also didn't seem to think that an extra click to make multiple payments was an issue. "It's only one more click" they said. I suggested a new link would help, back to the payments page. It's a pity too that the choice of display order isn't set as a user preference as I'm sure not everyone will like this feature. The helpdesk promised to pass my comments on but I'll never know if they did. It would have been good to have been able to send the feedback to the right department. Someone there might have been more interested.

Digital Economy Bill

I've tuned in to BBC Parliament on and off over the last two days to hear the debate on the Digital Economy Bill. I have to say I was surprised how few members were in the House on an issue of such importance. If many MPs didn't realise how important the issue was then that alone should tell us that the whole matter needed far more debate than the government chose to allow.

While the House appeared to contain at most around 40 MPs at various stages of the debate, and at times far fewer, according to Hansard, 236 of them eventually voted. My MP wasn't amongst them so it would appear that I wasted my time contacting him about my concerns over this issue.

Can we be sure that the nearly 200 MPs who weren't in the chamber throughout the debate were actually following this elsewhere? If they were sitting in an internet cafe somewhere perhaps it should have dawned on them that in a year's time they might actually have to join the ranks of those trying to look interested on the green benches in the Commons chamber in order to find out what was being said, or at the very least remain in the House for the entire evening. If they had the luxury of living near enough to spend the evening at home then I hope they won't have the misfortune to be one of those whose internet accounts are temporarily suspended at some time in the future. The legal costs of fighting such a suspension will be beyond the means of the vast majority of people.

To tag or not to tag

I'm probably somewhat behind in finally exploring the possibility of using tags as a way of organising my bookmarks. I was still using IE6 until a couple of weeks ago I finally succumbed to all the messages telling me my browser was in urgent need of replacement and installed IE8. At a stroke, finding the right sub-folder to put a link in became a real headache as Microsoft in their wisdom had "improved" favorites and it was no longer possible to collapse the folders.

OK, so those of you who've been living with this for a while have adapted somehow - or left to explore other browsers, but my journey had just begun. I began by submitting a support ticket to Microsoft. I was amazed at the level of service but the guy trying to help me was incredulous at the complexity of the folder system I had set up and he could see why I was having problems. His suggested workaround was never going to work for me. If I achieved nothing more than my concerns being passed on to the project team for IE9 perhaps I will have achieved something.

Perhaps it was time to move into the world of social bookmarking and explore the possibility of finding links using tags not folders, so my next venture was to sign up for del.icio.us and install the Delicious Bookmarks add-on in Firefox. It was at this point that I realised I had some 4000 links stored in folders about 3 deep. It soon became apparent that letting the add-on choose tags for all these links was a big mistake. Any tag I chose to search for brought up a myriad of sites that did not contain the one I wanted.

Tags may be a brilliant idea if you are starting from scratch but for anyone with an existing hierarchy of bookmarks that works well, perhaps they are better used independently for new links until the point where you find that the old folders have become redundant. I'm not even sure I like the most recent version of Firefox. Suddenly you have to click once to bookmark the link and then again to choose where to store it and how to tag it. Perhaps next week I'll explore another browser. For now I might even go back to IE6!

Help is 14 clicks away

An organisation whose website I visit frequently runs a helpdesk for computing problems. That's fairly usual in most organisations but what is somewhat surprising about this one is the fact that they keep their contact details such a well kept secret. I know their phone number; I have the page it's on bookmarked, but having heard others were having trouble finding it, I decided to see for myself just how hard it was to locate on the organisation's website.

Here's what I had to do:

1. Read a 1 page introduction.
   
2. Read a 20 page guide. IT Support and Working with Computers is mentioned by page 11 but the helpdesk isn't mentioned until page 14, so a new user might not yet know it exists.
   
3. Click the Getting help and support link mentioned in the guide.
   
4. Click Computing Helpdesk.
   
5. Click Computing Guide.
   
6. Click Home. People new to the site may have trouble finding this. It doesn't explain where to find the ever so small link.
   
7. Click the Support Tab.
   
8. Scroll down; the Your Computer section is off the end of the page.
   
9. Click Computing Guide
   
10. Go back to Step 4 to find out where to go next - it isn't obvious.
    
11. Return to Computing Guide, if I could still remember how.
    
12. Click Getting Started.
    
13. Click Computing Helpdesk.
    
14. Click Contact Details - finally!
    

One of the key usability principles of websites is that navigation through them should be made easy. It shouldn't be this hard to find details for a helpdesk and I would hope that any organisation that recognised itself in this real scenario would take steps to tackle the problem very quickly. Actually, long before step 14, I'd decided Google would have been quicker, but a real new user might well have given up. Do they have to make it so hard?

Lost Networking

Am I the only person who thinks that a day out in London from the home counties using South West Trains has become extortionately expensive? It's not so long ago that a one day off-peak travel card from my area could be bought for around £8 and was usable on any train departing after 10am. Now it costs £14 for the same journey, though admittedly it would be a little cheaper after midday. Gone are the discounts that the Network rail card used to provide midweek as the minimum fare has been set at almost the price of the travelcard.

I wouldn't mind but for the fact that if I lived a short distance up the road I could travel anywhere I liked in Greater London for a day with an Oyster card for around £6 - £7, depending on which zone I started from and there are no silly super off- peak restrictions there. It would be tempting to jump in the car and do just that, but sadly the price of parking at the stations a few miles away is just as daft as my train fare.

You would think that government would impose some sanity on the situation to relieve congestion on local roads. If I spend the day in London shopping I am merely filling up an otherwise half empty train carriage. If I travel to somewhere like Bluewater or Lakeside round the M25 I'm adding to an already heavily congested motorway. In fact I didn't want to go shopping this week, but I might have spent a day being a tourist in central London. If I couldn't arrive until after midday at a sensible price there was little point.

I could of course buy a Network card just to use on Saturdays, but I probably wouldn't use it enough to justify its cost. It’s a pity though that South West Trains doesn't take into consideration the fact that a significant proportion of its customers have days off midweek rather than weekends and also that many are holidaying at home this year. This seems to be an opportunity lost to fill all those empty seats.

Beyond Watford and back

I should have known better than to head North up the M1 on a Saturday in August. The world and his wife had clearly set out several hours before me and I was still trundling at 40mph or worse round the M25 at the point in time when I should have been rounding the corner to my final destination.

By Woburn, coffee was beckoning and I pulled in to the service area for a brief interlude. The car park was a sea of caravans, trailer tents and scout mini buses, bikers in leather and families with small kids eating ice creams, dad in shorts, the office already far away.

On the way back I must have encountered all those returning after last week's rain. I detoured through Watford and promptly joined the queue of cars waiting patiently for the football ground to disgorge its endless stream of fans, purposefully striding along, it seemed, in their yellow supporters' T-shirts. Whole families, kids in tow, teenagers, best mates, they were all there. As I passed on through Northwood and Ruislip, an occasional pair were exquisitely dressed with boutique carriers in hand, back from a day out in the West End perhaps. Others, more nondescriptly attired, were struggling home from the weekly shop and there were teenagers let loose for the holidays, more interested in their friends, maybe, than where they were heading.

I wonder how many of the people crawling round London's outskirts would have gone by train if our transport system were more integrated. I remember travelling to Toronto in the 70s and being amazed that interchange stations for city buses were undercover and warm. You could hop on and off buses as many times as you liked before the expiry time of your ticket. Thirty years later, even central London doesn't match that kind of experience, though the Oyster card has improved life for regular travellers. Anyone with more than a light suitcase to carry is still distinctly unwelcome though, as steep steps sometimes form impenetrable barriers with not a lift or escalator in sight. The M25 carries cars, but why wasn't it built with a railway alongside, linking effectively with frequent bus and train services from en-route stations, along spokes leading in and out of the city and to airports?

I actually enjoyed my return journey yesterday. Its slow pace provided a fascinating diversion as I stopped at countless sets of traffic lights, watching the melée of people making their way home after a Saturday out. As a mere onlooker though, I was all too aware that I added to congestion on streets where I didn't need to be.