Alan Brody Blog

6 Steps to Missing Your Train with the Ticket Machine

by Alan Brody

Thanks to the MTA, we now know what interface hell looks like when you buy a train ticket on their electronic vending machines. The obstacle course the MTA throws up is the perfect example of what happens when high tech lands in the wrong hands. Instead of a simple, ticket-buying experience you, poor traveler, are dragged through a multiple choice and misdirection madness that looks like the MTA’s All Passengers Left Behind Program.

To begin with, it never dawned on the MTA that when you’re buying a train ticket you’re probably in a hurry. There’s the train coming, there’s people breathing down your neck and maybe, just maybe you really don’t want to play a bureaucratic videogame.

Not have missed trains on the occasion that I have used these punishing devices but one of their technicians began laughing at me when noticed me struggling at Gand Central Station: “They ask too many questions, don’t they,” he laughed. “Well, don’t you tell them,” I asked, naively thinking that they would welcome direct intelligence form the field. “I do,” he said, “but it goes nowhere.”

So here is ecommerce looks like when you a few million, little digital savvy and even less accountability.

The first screen delivers 5 choices with largest box devoted to the least likely purchase. True, it comes at the end but it is nevertheless disconcerting. The first time user will take a microsecond to double check on the content of the large box just in case they missed something. Subtract one design point.

Since I am coming in from Scarsdale, the machine shows this one glimmer of intelligence – guesses that I just might be headed for Grand Central. Bravo. For moment you think you have entered man-machine harmony. Add one design point.

Just as you feel at one with the machine, it throws the first of series of curve balls. It sks one another question: Peak or Non-Peak?

I suspect there may be a random soul who is loading up on ticket for the next day, or is planning to take a leisurely lunch before ambling back to the station. But the vast majority of purchasers are here because they want THE NEXT TRAIN. In that case, the machine aught to be able to figure out whether or not you need Peak or Off-Peak. For now you can satisfy yourself by reading the fine print where you will be treated to another mindbender. Instead of telling when the last PEAK train leaves the station – it tells you by arrival time so you have to do the math. Does the 9:37 mean PEAK or not PEAK. Several dollars are at stake here. On the other hand, since nothing is at stake, they very kindly tell when the last PEAK train leaves Grand Central. As if that matters. Deduct one design point plus a scold for deviousness.

Let’s say you’ve gone this far without driving the purchasers behind you crazy you may think it is time to settle up and get out of Dodge. Not so fast. Now you have options. I’m guessing very few people want these options. I could be wrong, but since they have a way of bringing up options that you may never want, why not have a ticket fast track? In any case, deduct a point for giving me no option to have no options.

Now you get to pay. You have made it screen 4 and you must believe that relief is coming. This screen asks if you are ready to pay. You bet….but…

Like a timeshare salesman who won’t let you out of the room they hit you again with a big box asking if you want more. Since regular users have figured that anything other than blue boxes are irrelevant, they deserve some credit even though Credit and Debit cards are easily confused. Deduct a half point.

The next head fake comes in the following two screens. First, you are instructed to “Please Insert and Remove Card.” At this point the train is heard beating down the tracks and the customer behind you is taking quick breaths.

You plunge in the card. Instead of hearing the roar of a ticket being printed you a deliverd a screenful of more information. It is quite hard to read this all in the muted light of Scarsdale but almost impossible in the sunlit glare of outdoor suburban kiosk.

What you get is eyeful of useless features. Instead of simply asking for your zip code it chooses the more fully rounded: “Please enter credit card billing ZIP code and press OK to continue.” Gas stations do fine with “Zip Code” and a numeric keypad but not the kiosk komedians. After they have poked you in the eye with the long question they deliver a fully formed screenful of letters. There may well be the odd Canadian or Brit on our suburban lines but the vast majority need numbers for an American ZIP code.

Then comes the zinger: if you linger too long, or hit the wrong keys such as not registered and number and then hitting OK there is no error fixing. The kiosk throws you back to the beginning of the turgid credit card insertion process.

screenfull of mixed signals pops up. You get a large keyboard and the dicreet questin at the top asking for e need your zip code.

Unless you hail from Canada, you are going to be mighty confused. Why would they present yo with a QWETY keyboar when it asks for your zip code. By the time you have found the numeric keypad and realized that you  are supposed to ignore the letters, you notice a few other things as well: your train might be wheeling into the station. Or a line of passengers have formed behind you, breathing down your neck.

You just might be foregiven for not entering the digits just right. Perhaps you don’t apply quite enough pressure. Or you enter the numbers in the wrong order. Acreen pops up to inform you. Oops you try to correct but no…the screen takes you back to re-onserting you credit card. And so it goes again.

At this point, some percentage of riders will abandon the machine, thinkg, how much more can it be to buy a ticket on the train? The answer is – about double. Not only that, but you need cash or, you’re off the train, pal.

You may wonder why a billion dollar operation would plant these machines that violiate several critical rules of interface design – enough to put Amazon’s Bezos into peals of laughter. Or enough to make you wonder if any MTA executive ever vsited Apple as long as they were in the Big Apple. In other words, their design firm or information architercts or unser testing company owes them a refund.

That would be a generous interpretation. Or they could be burrearact who desing a system that only a bureaucrat would love. The end result is slower thatn necessary ticket line and an increase in passengers having to pay on the train. Hich slows down the ocnductor and so necessitates an increased ticket charge.  

The more cyinical explanation is that they have bamboozled cumsters into wanting to pay more on the train.