The Bay Of Execution and Evaluation
Comments: 6 - Date: February 7th, 2008 - By: Schwern - Categories: interfaces
Let me tell you a design horror story. It has to do with my first experience with the simple act of getting a transit ticket from a BART machine. First, let us contemplate one of the BART’s horrors:
Oh god, I don’t even know where to start either using it or explaining why it’s so horrifying. But this clunking horror is not the machine I have come to tear apart. I’m going to talk about one of their more modern machines. Unrestrained by a mechanical interface, with all the power of modern computing technology behind it, they chose to create… well, you’ll see.
You purchase travel cards with various amounts of cash on them. For a traveler just getting into the city that’s bad enough, I have no idea how the transit system works or what travel costs. First thing I have to decide is “how much money do you want to spend on transit”. I DON’T KNOW! I’m not thinking in terms of “$20 worth of travel” I’m thinking “I need to go from the airport to downtown”. It would be great if it allowed me to add money to my card like that. Push “airport to downtown”. Voila! The actions match my goal. But no, I have to translate my goal into a dollar value which as a new user of the system I have on idea how to do.
New York City is $2 per ride, $7 all day for the whole system. Pittsburgh and Portland employ a zone fare system — less to calculate and you can get an “all zone” pass. BART fares are PER STOP and change depending where you get on and get off. The Long Island Rail Road works like that, too, but their machines ask you where you’re coming from and going to and then calculate the price. They even know what stop the machine is located at so that’s one less decision to make. BART has this huge paper chart, like some 18th century nautical navigation table. You need a special calculator just to figure out how much a fare costs.
But that’s not the truly horrifying part. Once you do figure out how much train you want, let’s say it’s $2.95 (usually you just give in and decide “hell, I’ll just get $10 and fuck the wastage” which I think is their actual plan) what now? You’ve tortuously translated your simple goal into the action the ruthless BART robot wants. Now you enter two-nine-five and then feed it a fiver and get change, right? Oh no. Oh no no no. That would be far too simple.
Your robotic BART overlords simply demand cash. The first thing it asks you is how you want to pay, and god help you if you say “cash”. When you do it simply demands money. Doesn’t ask you how much money, it just wants greenbacks. This so derailed me I had to call a friend for help. My goal is to get to the Mission District from the airport and here’s this robotic pimp who will cut me if he doesn’t get his money, bitch.
You put in your bills, see, and when you’ve told it you’re done it asks you how much money you want back. So now you have to do math. Not only that, but you enter it by pushing buttons to subtract nickels, dimes, quarters and dollars. You’re making your own change. Here you are telling a MATHEMATICAL COMPUTING MACHINE how to make change. It’s 2008, and I still have neither a flying car nor jet pack but they don’t have to rub it in by making me tell a COMPUTER how to SUBTRACT!
Just how bad of an interface is this? Let’s review the Gulf of Execution and Evaluation.
Goal:
- Take train from airport to downtown.
Execution (what do I do to meet my goal?)
- Tell machine how I want to pay [cash]
- Realize I have to figure out how much the trip costs
- Cancel the transaction to find and study the fare chart
- Locate the fare chart
- Figure out what stop I’m at
- Figure out what stop I’m going to
- Figure out the price [$2.95]
- Go back to the machine
- Tell machine how I want to pay [cash]
- Machine demands cash, but did not ask me how much I wanted to pay
- Give it $5 and hope for the best
- Tell it that’s all the money it gets
- Push buttons to increment and decrement the value until it equals the 2.95 I wanted in the first place
- Tell it I’m done
- Take my ticket
- Take my change
- Realize I’ve missed my train
Who thought this was a good idea? Maybe this is a conspiracy of the San Francisco rental car industry.
For purposes of edumication I’m going to use a much worse system than BART actually uses, it’s one that a lot of bus systems use.
Evaluation (did I meet my goal?)
- Examine card for any indication of value [there is none]
- Realize I can check the value at a special machine
- Find a fare checking machine
- Swipe card, it has 2.95 but will that get me downtown?
- Wait for bus
- Get on bus
- Attempt to pay
- Be informed it’s actually $3.60
- Get off bus
- Interact with the robotic BART pimp again to add money
- Wait for the next bus
The actual BART system is a little better, they don’t charge you until you get off the train so at least you don’t miss your train fighting the robot pimp. The LIRR goes one better and prints your source and destination right on the ticket, you can evaluate your action just by looking at the ticket. This only works for single travel tickets, but the problem of evaluation can be solved for multi-trip tickets. Weekly and monthly tickets can have their dates printed right on the ticket. For 10-trip tickets the LIRR uses the simple expedient of just punching a hole in the ticket for each use. Low tech, but it does the job.
Comment by Audrey - 7 February 2008 @ 17:22
I had similar troubles with the S-Bahn system in Frankfurt. Plus there were both individual tickets and group tickets, and the group ones were the better deal if you were traveling with even one other person, which wasn’t obvious from the info at the kiosk. I kept thinking “my German isn’t that bad!” but it isn’t really a language problem so much as having no clue what the machine intends for you to do.
Comment by Johanna - 7 February 2008 @ 18:55
GREAT post! Perhaps the problem would be resolved if the folks designing these systems actually had to use them on a daily basis?
Comment by Schwern - 7 February 2008 @ 23:46
SFO natives tell me that it works better if you actually live there and use BART a lot. You tend to want to just drop $20 onto the card and use it until it runs out, it’s more efficient for that but sucks for every other use.
Comment by Andy Lester - 8 February 2008 @ 22:49
“SFO natives tell me that it works better if you actually live there and use BART a lot.”
Very telling, and not surprising. It doesn’t make it any less awful for those of us who are thrown into the middle of a system we know nothing about, with nobody to explain it to us.
Comment by anonymous - 13 March 2008 @ 17:36
The whole BART ticket machine experience is just amazingly awful, especially when combined with the Muni experience in the shared stations, where the Muni change machines only give dollar coins, but the BART machines don’t take them, and the BART change machines can change your $20 into fives, which Muni won’t take. Chicago is pretty bad too: there’s no information at all anywhere at all before you get on the train, the ticket machines just don’t give change, and determining how much you actually need to pay is made even more difficult by the fact that taking one ride is $1.75, but a second ride within 2 hours is only an extra 25 cents. I’ve been a bit surprised by how well the NYC system actually works.
Comment by Carl Pham - 21 May 2008 @ 7:01
See, that’s the weird OCD thing about programmers. They feel everything ought to be designed beautifully, whatever the cost, and whatever the benefit. This is, economically and practically speaking, nuts.
The number of strangers who drop into SFO and want to take BART to downtown and who have no friends or family there to help them out with this stuff is pretty much a set of measure zero. Far too small to waste valuable engineering design talent on, when those $150,000 a year men could be put to use, say, making sure the damn trains run at all, and on time (which is hard enough for BART to pull off on a regular basis).
I’m not saying your criticism aren’t spot on. They surely are. But it sounds like it hasn’t quite occured to you yet that nearly everything you see around you has had the minimum possible amount of design talent spent on it, with the consequence that, if you have any design talent (or critical thinking skills) yourself, you’re bound to be disappointed in the quality of design of nearly everything. But this is efficient, this is how it should be. If as a society we wasted design talent where it wasn’t necessary, e.g. designing BART ticket machines, it wouldn’t be available for where it was, e.g. designing the bridges over which BART trains run.
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