Relatively speaking, it’s a bit of a Stone Age as far as mobile technology is concerned. It is time when colour screens on mobiles were rare, only 43% of us were texting each other, and we were all just discovering a really useful search engine called Google.

We’re planning a train journey from London Marylebone to Birmingham Moor Street (a favourite among the Masabi testing team). It’s roughly a two hour journey with no changes, so it should be simple enough…

OK, first we need to find out how much this journey will cost, since we like to be prepared and want to know how much money to bring to the station to buy a ticket. This is before the days of ticket machines that accept payment cards, and cash machines weren’t as widespread as they are nowadays.

To find out the fare beforehand, we’re going to have to use the National Fares Manual. This is an index – published twice a year – that details every single rail fare on the UK’s Rail Network. Think of it as a sort of Domesday Book for the railways. To put it into perspective, there are over 200 million different rail fares in existence in the UK today. Yes, that’s right, there are more rail fares in the UK than people! However, we don’t need all of the rail fares, so let’s just use the tome that covers the Midland region. That’s still quite a challenge: it weighs in at over 1,000 pages. It will take us a while to find the journey and make the necessary discount calculations for our Young Person’s Railcard.

Anyway, now we’ve figured out the eventual price of the ticket and got enough money out, we still don’t know what time our train leaves. We ring up National Rail Enquiries and find out what time the train is due. Then it’s time to go down to the station.

When we get to the station, we need to use the ticket office to buy our ticket. Unfortunately it turns out to be quite a popular time to travel, and we have to stand in a lengthy queue. As the minutes pass, we massage to miss our train because we’re still in the ticket queue.

We finally get to the front of the queue and buy our ticket in cash. Next, out on the platform, there are no departure boards and we want to find out what time the next train is due – time to check the timetables. Here’s an example of a train timetable, which generally does a good job of arranging the data logically. However, the problem is that we don’t actually need most of this information, and it’s difficult to separate what’s relevant from what isn’t:

All in all, taking the train just wasn’t that easy.

Back to the Future

10 years later, let’s do the journey again… To speed the whole process up, we can download the Chiltern Railways app on our mobile, and look up fare prices and train times at the same time. Because we’re buying our ticket in advance on our mobile, not only can we get much cheaper fares than buying them at the station on the day, we can also compare different fare prices and train times with each other. We’ve upgraded from a Young Person’s Railcard to a Gold Card because we’re a bit older now, but whatever the railcard, the app calculates all the discounts for us and shows us the total price that we will be paying.

The interface also tells you which fares can’t be used on a particular train by greying them out – and vice versa. In this way, you can easily see which tickets can and can’t be used. However, if you really want a greyed-out fare, select it, and the interface will highlight the nearest appropriate train:

We can then securely pay for an mTicket (mobile ticket) using our card.

The mTicket is sent to our phone as an encrypted 2D barcode.

We have now successfully planned our journey and bought our ticket in minutes

In the taxi on the way to the station, we can even use the live departure board function to check if our train’s on time. After arriving at the station, we can walk straight past the ticket machines and ticket office, scan our mTicket on the gate, and get straight on our train.

Masabi develops mobile technology that makes transport ticketing easier for passengers and more cost-effective for transport operators. The Chiltern Railways app was developed in conjunction with Chiltern Railways and Atos Origin and is available on most handsets. It can be downloaded by texting ‘Chiltern’ to 88600 or by visiting your device’s official app store.

Contact us today on contact[at]masabi.com to discuss how we can help you.

Related posts:

1. Passenger Focus Research Into Ticket Purchase Problems
2. First TPExpress Press Release: Buy Rail Tickets on Everyday Mobile Phones
3. Chiltern Railways Named ‘iPhone App of the Week’ on App Store

A Brief History of Barcodes

Barcodes, in their 1D format, were first developed in the rail industry to label railroad cars for automated tracking. They achieved commercial success in the 1990s, when they were adapted to be used on consumer goods such as supermarket food items. Since then, their influence has spread to encompass virtually any identification system that can be processed by a machine.

A common 1D barcode known as EAN-13

How Do Barcodes Work?

In simple terms, barcodes are a visual language that is recognised by computers. In other words, a scanner reading a barcode is like a person reading a sentence. Since computers process binary data, every line or pixel in a barcode represents a 1 or a 0. After scanning, the lines or pixels are ‘translated’ by the computer into binary data, a series of 1s and 0s.

Crucially, all barcodes contain an error detection system (the check sum in the image above). This ensures that a barcode will be rejected if it cannot be read correctly (e.g. due to damage or tampering). It works like this: after scanning the code, the reader performs a simple check sum (mathematical calculation) over the 1s and 0s of the message, and compares this value to the check sum within the barcode itself (which was calculated before the barcode was generated) – if they do not match, the scan is rejected because some of the 1s and 0s in the message must have been changed.

The Leap to 2D

2D barcodes, which are now becoming more prevalent in our day-to-day lives, are a more sophisticated evolution of their 1D variant. Whereas information on a 1D barcode is stored and read horizontally only, 2D barcodes store information both vertically and horizontally. The lines of a 1D barcode thus become dots, or pixels, in 2D. Consequently, 2D barcodes are able to store much more data and communicate much more complicated tasks within a smaller physical area, though obviously they require enhanced scanning equipment.

The numbers 1234567890 encoded into EAN-13 and Aztec formats; red lines indicate scanning axes

Barcode Symbologies

There may not appear to be much of a difference between any two barcodes, other than cosmetic, but there are actually hundreds of types, and they each require a specific symbology to be able to decode them. These different types are each developed to suit a specific role or industry.

Each barcode symbology comes with a specification, which is a technical document that explains how that barcode pattern is displayed, how it functions, and how it must be printed in order to be properly decoded.

Barcode readers in different forms. They can also be mobile phone cameras or embedded in large machines e.g. ticket gates at stations

What is a Symbology?

To extend our analogy of a machine language, a barcode symbology can be seen as a language ‘dictionary’ for a specific type of barcode. It tells a reader (which can be either a laser scanner or a digital camera) how to read the barcode, and decode the squares into data. Common types of 2D barcodes include Aztec, Data Matrix and QR Code. While they all look similar in appearance, each one is encoded in a different ‘language’.

So, for example, just as we can read this sentence in English, a scanner installed with the QR symbology can read a 2D barcode encoded with the QR symbology. However, without the appropriate symbology, the scanner would not be able to decode a Data Matrix barcode, just as we would not understand this sentence if it were written in, say, Swahili: we would recognise the letters, but not be able to extract any meaningful information from the sequence in which they are placed in the words or sentence.

Error Correction

Just as in 1D barcodes, each 2D symbology includes error detection. More importantly though, 2D symbologies also contain error correction measures to make sure that a barcode can still be read and all its information captured, even if an error is detected. Human brains have similar error correction, for example if you cover up the bottom half of all the letters in a sentence you can still read the words without too much trouble. The barcode provides enough redundant information and mathematical encoding to reconstruct the original information even with significant chunks missing.

E.g. Like the words above, a damaged barcode can still be read perfectly well

Proprietary and Non-Proprietary Symbologies

So, in summary, to be able to scan a barcode, we must have the symbology in which it is encoded, and as we have said, there are many different types. These types can be sorted into two categories:

1. Non-proprietary – the symbologies of these barcodes are public domain, and so are freely available to anyone. They are also regulated by various organisations to ensure they have a standardised specification and are suitable for commercial use. QR, Aztec and Data Matrix are all examples of non-proprietary barcodes
   

   Examples of non-proprietary barcodes all containing the same information (the text from http://www.masabi.com/passengers/the-future/)

2. Proprietary – these symbologies are privately owned and developed, so they can only be decoded by software that is owned or licensed by the company that owns the symbology. These are usually developed by companies to suit a specific purpose.

The Rise of the QR Code

One of the rising technological trends in marketing recently has been the appearance of the QR barcode. The QR barcode was first used commercially in Japan in 2002 by the mobile phone manufacturer DoCoMo. Since they controlled the vast majority of the handset market, they were able to introduce QR barcode scanning support on all of their handsets, and QR barcode use expanded very quickly.

A typical user experience would be to take a picture of a barcode on a movie poster, and then the encoded data tells the phone to take you to the movie’s website. Now that the technology has come to the West, this currently seems to be the sum of most people’s experiences with 2D barcodes, and consequently, we as consumers are only aware of half of the 2D barcode’s true value.

QR vs. Aztec

The essential difference between the more common QR code and Aztec is that QR codes are better for being read by consumers’ phones. Aztec, however, is better for being displayed on consumers’ phones – essential for high-speed scanning in a busy transport environment.

Aztec barcode train tickets on small, medium and large screen devices

Although QR and Aztec codes can both support text or binary data, at different sizes, it’s how the scanner understands how to read each symbology that makes them different. The most noticeable aspect of this is the positioning of the finder pattern – the squares that allow the scanner to find and orient the barcode, adjusting for any skew, scaling or rotation and interpreting the pixels accordingly.

For QR, the reader needs to see all four corners of the barcode because the finder pattern squares are placed in three corners.

Additionally, QR (and Data Matrix) barcodes need a quiet zone – an area of white around them to distinguish them from their surroundings – so that the scanner can clearly read the finder pattern in the corners.

The red arrows indicate the finder pattern squares, which are always in the same three corners

For Aztec, however, the finder pattern squares are placed in the centre, which means that the scanner only needs to see the centre of the barcode clearly to orient it. This is because the user might misalign the corners of the barcode when turning the screen away from them and towards a reader. As a result, all the user needs to do is put the phone screen roughly in the centre of the reader to scan the barcode. This gives Aztec faster scan times with fewer problems, making it ideal for mass-market use as a mobile ticket.

Moreover, because the finder pattern is in the centre, Aztec barcodes do not need a quiet zone. This means that even on phones with a small screen (where the barcode fills the entire screen), Aztec barcodes can be displayed and scanned properly.

Even surrounded by a colour that may confuse a reader (e.g. the black frame of a phone), the barcode can still be read

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can now say that barcodes are not simply a series of bars or dots, but are a complicated and diverse set of machine languages, many with specific uses and some that suit more general purposes. They are a visual, encoded representation of binary data that can be read by computers and translated into code or text, and include built-in measures for error detection – and in the case of 2D, error correction – to safeguard against damage, tampering or improper scanning.

We can classify them according to dimension (i.e. 1D or 2D), their symbology and whether they are proprietary or non-proprietary. Masabi are currently working with Aztec barcodes to bring transport tickets to your mobile phone.

This blog was intended as an introduction to 2D barcodes. For a more technical guide to the QR style of phone readable 2D barcodes, this white paper is very informative.

All the barcodes for this blog were all made using barcode-generator.org .Try making your own!

Any questions? Leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

UPDATE (22/03/2011):

This article was mentioned on this month’s Carnival of the Mobilists #247: best mobile blogging of March. Check it out!:

http://mobithinking.com/blog/carnival-of-the-mobilists-247

Related posts:

1. Ticket Sculptures at Waterloo
2. Ideas for Interoperability of Secure Barcode Tickets
3. Masabi CEO to Deliver Speech at The Future of Air Rail

With this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona just over a week away, there is a palpable sense of excitement in the air, and the mobile world is poised for the biggest calendar event of the year. This year, Masabi will have its first ever exhibition space at MWC, and we invite everyone to visit our pod to learn more about our transport m-ticketing software.

We’ll be demonstrating our transport m-ticketing software running on a wide range of handsets, from the latest high-end smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry Torch and Samsung Galaxy right through to older legacy devices like the Nokia 6300. You’ll be able to see first-hand how our expertise has crafted an intuitive, polished experience across all major platforms and handsets.

Interested in arranging a meeting with Masabi? Please email us at mwc@masabi.com.

The Masabi exhibition will be situated on the UKTI stand on the Avenue, AV26 – view it on the MWC technical floorplan here.

Related posts:

1. Masabi at Transport Ticketing 2012
2. Masabi @ Mobile World Congress 2011
3. Masabi Wins a Top Place on UKTI Stand at Barcelona MWC

(Other advantage: in-journey origami!)

Related posts:

1. Passenger Focus Research Into Ticket Purchase Problems
2. Thoughts on ITSO part 1: Smartcard Ticket Usability
3. Chiltern Railways Press Release: The iPhone revolution reaches rail in an end to ticket office queues

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. Passenger Rail: A 10 Year Flashback
2. Chiltern Railways Press Release: The iPhone revolution reaches rail in an end to ticket office queues
3. Thoughts on ITSO part 1: Smartcard Ticket Usability

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. Funding Your Startup slides from Android Developer Evening @TechHub

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. Ticket Sculptures at Waterloo
3. Chiltern Railways Press Release: The iPhone revolution reaches rail in an end to ticket office queues

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. Masabi to Demonstrate Transport M-Ticketing at MWC 2011 – Visit Us on Stand AV26
3. London Technology Forum