Have you ever found yourself frustrated by how complex and messy our digital society has made what were previously quite simple tasks? Take paying for parking your car. Once there were simple cash ticket machines (or even someone in a cabin at the entrance). Pay, display the ticket; job done. Now there may still be a cash option, but increasingly you need a smart phone app to park. Woe betide you if your phone is too old to support their new wizzy app. Plus, of course, you need to load up 10 or more apps to cover all the different companies/authorities that run UK car parks. Let alone if you hire a car abroad, where yet more apps are needed! And this applies across all of modern life. It seems that, instead of making daily tasks quicker and easier, you need to spend more time than ever learning the skills and buying the right tech for our digital world.
My wife and I had a holiday abroad in May. This was a special anniversary treat, travelling to Hong Kong and Japan, and our experience with the public transport systems of these two countries got me reflecting on the sort of issues outlined above. For the Hong Kong stopover I was able to easily order tickets online for their airport express with access via gates using the QR code supplied. Once there, the metro uses the same system as in London – you tap in and out at stations using your credit/debit card or smart device and the cost of that trip is charged to your account. The careful thoughtful design of software has made it extremely easy for anyone (local or international visitors) to use these systems.
For Japan, it was frankly weird. For some travel, buying and using public transport tickets was complex, confusing and difficult, while for others it was simplicity itself. This started with the rail shuttle from Narita Airport to the city centre. Japan’s rail system is internationally viewed as the pinnacle of good design. We were advised that there can be very long queues to buy airport shuttle tickets and, as we were on a tight schedule, I sought to buy these in advance. I believe purchasing these in Japan is easy, but not for those outside. Eventually I found an agency that offered them. They didn’t sell the tickets themselves, but a QR voucher to use on a specific airport ticket machine. What’s more, as all seats were reserved, you book a specific train. Thus I had to select a specific shuttle service, assuming the aircraft would land on time, and then guess how long passport control and baggage collection would take. If we missed the reserved train, we could take pot luck on their being space on a later service.
Collecting the tickets was somewhat traumatic. There are all sorts of ticket machines at the airport for different services and operators. My instructions, which printed out to three pages, included pictures of the ticket machine which worked for my booking and the ones to avoid. Added to this, there were ticket machines scattered in different places so I had to run around before finding the right one and joining the queue. Oh, and the machine only had limited instructions in English, so the 3 pages of instructions included which Japanese text buttons to press!
I managed it eventually, but took a photo of the queue and mix of ticket machines, just to share with you today.
Japan’s high speed Shinkansen trains have an enviable reputation for leading edge technical design and service quality. However, once at a Shinkansen station, the ticketing system was essentially a repeat of the above! Once in Japan I was able to access a simpler online process for the return ticket, but not very much easier to use. Possibly readers of this blog may have managed to work out something better – but it seems there is a digital learning process in which you need to stumble first before you find an easier way!
Then, once in Japan, we experience exactly the opposite for using their local public transport systems. Imagine if, in Britain, you could use a stored value smart card that worked in exactly the same way on all local public transport systems throughout the country. In Japan they have this – their IC card works in almost all towns and cities and for most operators – either public or private. In the end we used it for the return airport shuttle (even though, again, we had to specify exactly which train we would catch!).
Way back in 1996-8, I worked on a research project built around the design of innovative clean transport technologies. One case study I work on was an electric minibus to be used by Camden Community Transport for services for people with mobility difficulties. To get the EU grant, the project needed an innovative vehicle design, but that was not the real design focus. The idea was to integrate the booking and operating systems of several providers of overlapping services, including community transport, dial a ride, voluntary lift giving, non-emergency ambulances etc. Each isolated operation didn’t provide a very good service to its users, with a lot of waste and expense involved. A key aim of this project was to use emerging computing capability to provide a single simple booking portal for users of all these operations. The passenger might travel on any of the services, with the income generated (fare or subsidy) allocated to each operator. The headline lesson was that when computing advances facilitate the the introduction of a new service design, the key challenge is to keep the user interface simple even if the back office operations are complex. Don’t digitalise analogue systems but redesign your system around digital capabilities.
This key lesson from 1998 is more relevant today than back then. We seem to be experiencing a bit of my Japanese travel trauma as some digital systems make life better informed and easier to use, while others seem to do nothing than add layers of mind bending complexity and mess. AI might be the key to eventually emerging out of this. Maybe.
This is a generic issue and it can affect the adoption of vital technologies and systems. A lot has been written and vast sums spent on the design and installation of electric vehicle charging points, but they suffer from the same multiple provider/ multiple app syndrome as car parking. Arrive at a charging point with the wrong app installed on your phone and you are stuffed. Imagine turning up at a petrol station and having to have a specific app to buy petrol – EV charging is a badly designed, user un-friendly service system, which in itself discourages the expansion of EV uptake to the wider mass market. But there is hope; the EV support company, Zapmap, have introduced an integrating app that accesses almost all charging operator EV points. It just happens to be that Zapmap was founded by an OU PhD student of mine who, as part of his research, was involved with me in that 1998 innovative clean transport technology project. Coincidence? I think not…
Oh – and for the parking app conundrum, action is going ahead. While I was musing on this blog, the UK government announced implementing a “one app fits all” approach to parking payments to simplify the process for drivers. A new National Parking Platform will allow motorists to use their preferred parking app at any participating car park, regardless of which app the car park uses.
You could probably add other examples. We spend a lot of time designing clean products and services, but designing away digital mess needs to be one of today’s key challenges.
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