Chiltern Railways ticket machines are a fascinating study in UX design, because they've clearly been designed by someone who knows how to design travel booking websites, and if you shove a website into a metal box with a giant touchscreen, that's a ticket machine, right? Nuh-uh.
They've removed the button that says "give me an off-peak return", and you're forced to go through the motions of choosing a pair of trains so that it can tell you "oh, you'll be wanting an off-peak return then"
but to be honest I'll let them off that one, because they've arsed around with the fares system so much that you now have to be a GIANT TRAIN NERD to know what an off-peak ticket actually is.
So you choose your ticket, and add it to your basket. Wait, why does a ticket machine have a shopping basket? We're in the physical world here. If I want to buy multiple tickets, I can buy the first ticket first, and hold it, IN MY ACTUAL HAND, while I buy the second one.
Oh, right, it's not really a ticket machine, is it. It's an oversized iPad running a React web app.
So I have my ticket in my basket, and I want to use a railcard. In the old days, it would have popped up a screen full of big buttons and you'd press the one for your railcard. Maybe the buttons would even have pictures of the cards on them. Hey, this is the future.
But no, for some reason this has to happen in a tiny corner of the Shopping Basket Page. But hey, we're web designers, and we know how to squish complex UI elements into a small space... Yep, we'll put the list of railcards in a dropdown. With a scroll bar.
If your ticket machine needs a scroll bar, something has gone very badly wrong.
"Oh, come on! Everyone's used tablets. Even a toddler knows how to swipe through a scrolling list." Oh, I see the problem. You were prototyping this software on an actual iPad, weren't you? Ahahahaha.
Now try it on an industrial slab of vomit-resistant glass that takes half a second to register a press, just far enough from your finger so that everything requires three attempts. Oh by the way your train is leaving in 4 minutes and you still have to walk over the bridge
So you finally manage to select the right railcard, and then you have to click a separate "Add railcard" button and it leaves the dropdown open, because apparently using multiple railcards in one transaction is a really common workflow that needs to be streamlined.
Right, next page. Do I want to add PlusBus? No, I don't want to add PlusBus. Nobody ever wants to add PlusBus. If I were at home working through this website at my leisure, I might pause briefly to imagine the situations where it would make sense to spend four pounds
for the privilege of not having to buy a bus ticket, but right now it's three minutes to my train and you still haven't asked me to put my card in and I'm frankly annoyed that you've even wasted a button click on that question
and now I want to hunt down the marketing manager who attended a one-day course on Advanced Up-selling Strategies and thought this was a good idea and AARGH AARGH AARGH
Ticket machines are not websites. UX is important. The end.
