At Masabi, Passenger Focus’s earlier research into ticket maching usability was a key influence in the User Interface design of our mobile phone ticket vending app, and it was encouraging to see this new research appears to validate our approach.  The report shows that users choose humans over machines for the following main reasons:

1. “Incomplete ticket restriction information”
2. “A barrage of information and choices”
3. “Bewildering jargon”

“As a result some passengers would rather queue to speak to a member of staff, buy more expensive tickets than they need to or just give up and join the ticket office queue.”

Ticket Sales Usability

The UK has evolved a particularly complex fare structure, so a certain amount of complexity is innate in the system.  The trick is to remove as much as possible, allowing the passenger to make an informed decision based on price and/or time preferences, without any arcane rail fare knowledge – I can say from personal experience that most ticket machines really do handle this badly.

By fusing real timetables with fare selection, the Masabi mobile rail ticketing app allows the passenger to visualise which trains each ticket will be valid on very rapidly, whilst also including a more detailed concise restriction description than most in-station vending machines.  Timetables indicate which operator runs each train, a key point of confusion when many tickets are tied to a single operator.

The application can also adapt to the user, remembering favoured journeys and previously used payment cards (securely stored, and only reusable by re-entering the CVV number on the back). This personalisation helps eliminate the myriad of destinations thrown at the user of a vending machine, most of which will be totally irrelevant.

Queues

This year’s survey also looked at queue times in a number of regional stations – contrasting to last year, which focussed on the largest stations, almost all in London.

The industry lays down a maximum acceptable queue length of 3 minutes at off-peak times, and 5 minutes during peak times.  Many stations, big and small, are still failing to meet these standards (click on graph to see a larger version):

Mobile ticketing offers a solution to this, providing a superior ticket purchase experience combined with informative timetables – all of which can be tested risk-free whilst queuing for a window or ticket machine.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on ITSO part 1: Smartcard Ticket Usability
2. Masabi Signs M-Ticketing Deal with thetrainline.com
3. Making Mobile Commerce Relevant for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus

Making Mobile Commerce Relevant for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus

The unpleasant reality that we’ve learnt from 8 years working in mobile:

Just because you can do something with mobile technology

• does not mean that users will adopt it;
• does not mean that companies will promote it.

There has to be a compelling user benefit, or significant user pain to persuade somebody to try a new technology.
There also has to be a compelling business benefit, (preferably with a year-one breakeven these days) for the service to ever get the marketing and promotion it needs.

A surprisingly accurate quote from Douglas Adams sums this user adoption barrier up nicely:

1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

(acknowledgement to Faris Yakob for bringing this insightful quote to our attention at the Cellcom Conference in Israel)
This gem from Adams proved almost completely accurate with my own deep suspicion of blogging, twitter and facebook, compared with a colleague a few years younger who likes blogging and facebook but still rejects twitter as the work of the devil. Rather typically, neither of us has ever sent an MMS message or made a video call.

So, as a result of that:
An average mobile user uses voice and text messages.
An average business user uses voice, text, and email.

Newer technologies like Mobile TV, MMS, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook are not mass-market user requirements outside of media land and the internet youth – so what can the mobile industry do to get the normal mobile user into using m-Commerce or more advanced phone features?

Normal people only try a new technology if the old way of doing it is painful enough to make them get over their fears and give something new a try. The trick is that it is exactly when the user is in pain that you must offer them the improved mobile service – they won’t bother to sign up later on the internet.

mock-up of the ideal location to advertise a new mobile service - next to a big queue, and at the point of most customer pain.

We are following this exact mantra with the Mobile Ticket Machine that we are building at the moment for some of the UK Railway companies. Late-running customers regularly miss their trains – queues are a frustrating pain point for them. It is in these painful queues that we display adverts to persuade normal people try using their phone to buy the ticket – and then use their phone as the ticket, never having to queue again. We make purchasing streamlined, without any usernames and passwords to get in the way, and use technologies like SMS fallback to ensure reliable access. Immediate servicing of the customer is the main requirement.

Our early trials in 2007 with Chiltern Railways on mobile ticket purchasing via credit card revealed a startling result – many of the mobile ticket trial users were not just middle-youth technophiles. Going against our stereotypes, we discovered they were older and more female, on average, than we expected and had never before use their phone for anything but voice and SMS. The potential benefit of avoiding queues in the future was enough to make them willing to try five new technical steps in one go:

1. They were sent a WAP push
2. They progressed to a WAP page
3. They downloaded and installed an application
4. They entered a Credit Card number into the application
5. Then used their phone as a ticket.

Staggering, really – these people had never had any motivation in the past to download ringtones, logos or games and certainly no desire to do Twitter updates. Note that the service didn’t target just smartphones – it was available on standard phones as well, because a service with mass-market appeal should be available to the entire mass market.

After trying a mobile application for the first time because of significant need, a user will have a lower barrier to trying new mobile technology for less critical things in the future. They have already faced their fears and learnt the tricky steps to download an app and make a mobile purchase.

A discussion of the business case (and the related business politics) for mobile rail ticketing is another article in itself. Suffice to say that the service has to have a measurable effect on Cap-ex and Op-ex for the Rail Operators, be acceptable to a multi-franchise ecosystem of seperate and competitive companies, and also enable a quick and cheap “soft rollout” launch to prove interest and benefits before significant hardware Cap-Ex commitment is incurred.  This can be contrasted to the stalemate existing with the chicken-and-egg issues of NFC service rollout.

Mobile is not the mini-internet. It was essential that this particular project offer a mobile service, not just an extension of the internet.  It offers a complimentary service to in-station ticket machines and staffed wi
ndows, which still account for well over 70% of rail ticket sales in the UK, whilst solving problems for the customer in a way that fits tightly to their existing habits. It was never expected to compete with the web, or service web customers when they were away from their PCs.

I think that many of the future mobile commerce success stories will involve providing more traditional self-service options in the physical world – certainly, mobile banking in the developing world is an established success in this mould.  Cramming the internet experience onto the small screen may miss the point of mobile entirely.

Related posts:

1. Masabi Increases Mobile Application Usage by 50% with Encrypted SMS for Mobile Commerce
2. Global Messaging 2009 – Mobile Ticketing and Payments
3. Masabi and GrIDsure Launch Mobile Phone Secure ID System for User and e-Commerce Authentication

The ability to take payments from the customer and initiate the ticket sale from the mobile was cited as a key feature by a lot of attendees.

Related posts:

1. Masabi at Aarhus Mobile Ticketing Workshop
2. Århus Mobile Ticketing Workshop
3. Global Messaging 2009 – Mobile Ticketing and Payments

ITSO was formed to build and maintain a specification for secure ‘end to end’ inter-operable ticketing transactions. Specifically they mean smartcard ticketing, although this doesn’t seem to be a perfect solution. There are three main areas which raise serious questions for me about the ITSO specification as it stands (v 2.1.3), which are Usability, Commercials and Security.

In this post I will focus on the usability issues which arise from smartcard ticketing, which are not ITSO-specific.

Usability

On the surface, smartcard ticketing seems like a brilliant solution for the end user – anyone who has used London’s Oyster Card system will know that catching a bus has never been simpler, or quicker now that you don’t have to join a queue of people fumbling for change. However, transport in greater London is very simple, and so are its pricing structures. For a full UK-wide, multi-mode ticketing system there are bigger problems that need addressing.

Ticket purchase

The first problem that a smartcard ticketing system must face is how a customer gets his ticket onto his smartcard. Suggestions I’ve heard for this:

• use a vending machine, and swipe your card at the end to pick up your ticket
• buy from a teller, and swipe your card at the end to pick up your ticket
• buy from a conductor, and swipe your card at the end to pick up your ticket
• buy on the internet, and swipe your card at a ticket machine in your departure station to pick up your ticket

It’s not clear how any of these options is quicker or more convenient than buying a paper ticket.

Journey details

Traditionally, the details of a transport ticket are printed on the ticket itself. This simple system allows the holder to instantly check where there ticket will take them, how much it cost, whether they have a seat reserved and other pertinent details. An e-ticket on a smartcard has no such simple access – a separate electronic device is required to check details of a ticket, or even to check it actually exists. I asked a representative of ATOC how they planned to counter this, and the answer is primarily ‘a piece of paper with the ticket details printed on it’, and in future, NFC phones. For more info on when NFC will realistically be available, read our post on the subject. For now, the public will have to settle for a paper ticket in addition to the smartcard ticket whose aim is to replace paper tickets.

Ticket selection

Often people will own more than one transport ticket at any time. How does the smartcard, or the device reading your smartcard, “clip”^* the correct ticket? How would the customer check that the correct ticket has been clipped? Similarly to journey details, without an easy way for a customer to interpret his smartcard it becomes very difficult to manage.

* Tickets must be validated and marked as used by an inspector, conductor or ticket gate

Queues

One of the biggest complaints that passengers on UK rail make is the length of the queues. As shown above, smartcard ticketing does little to tackle this, and until the advent of NFC-enabled mobile phones, it might be possible that smartcards could increase queuing as concerned travellers ask ticket inspectors to make sure they are travelling on the correct ticket that is saved on their smartcard.

So what problem does ITSO smartcard ticketing actually solve? The only benefit would be to allow better tracking of individual passengers through the system. This would allow better understanding of how our public transport system is used, and therefore offer ways to increase efficiency. This passenger tracking could equally be achieved using barcodes in place of smartcards. Paper barcodes solve issues of ticket selection and viewing journey details. Transferring the same barcodes to mobile allows for simple ticket purchase with immediate delivery, so solving the other usability issues as well.

1. ITSO will be the standard for smart ticketing in England and the UK, ensuring that the local schemes are interoperable with each other.

Related posts:

1. Passenger Focus Research Into Ticket Purchase Problems
2. Masabi speaking at ITS UK Ticket Standards Seminar, and at European Telco Strategy event
3. Ideas for Interoperability of Secure Barcode Tickets

Related posts:

1. Århus Mobile Ticketing Workshop slides
2. Masabi to Present at Mobile Monday Estonia
3. Århus Mobile Ticketing Workshop

The content’s very similar to the talk Ben gave at Mobile Monday a fortnight ago, but obviously with slightly less polished delivery.

Related posts:

1. Intelligent Transport Systems’ Seminar
2. ITS Transport Standards Seminar – summary
3. MoMo London Demo Night summary