5 ms·

What is the issue here?

Nextgrid 4y ago
At first glance, the keyboard layout? The QWERTY layout has been around for much longer than this machine, so why not use it? The screen is barely readable too. I'm sure the software is equally terrible and slow as hell.
- padjo 4y ago
  We have similar machines here and the input is extremely unreliable and laggy, I.e buttons work maybe 30% of the time and it takes about a second to perform an action. I’m sure you can imagine how frustrating that is to use the first few times.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    Yea, this is, in some ways, the biggest UX issue, though something the designer likely had no control over. These machines are just unbearably slow, and I have no idea why. It seems crazy that something like typing in your plate number would take most of a second per character, which is made even worse by a lack of feedback if the button press was accepted, so you often double-type, which leads to corrections, which also take forever.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      I think the problem is that the implementation of the system is outsourced to companies who have more expertise navigating government bureaucracy than actually building good software. All the money gets spent on papers and endless meetings (and maybe passed under the table if not outright handed over if in a jurisdiction where corruption aka "lobbying" is legal) so there isn't much left to pay to attract & retain good talent. A few months/years down the line, even the sub-par talent working on it will probably realize how terrible their product is, but speaking up would be akin to admitting defeat (and might have career risks), so nobody says anything and congratulates themselves for having "delivered" the project. When the end client receives the deliverable the same situation applies, it's too late to backpedal even though the product is shit, so they also keep quiet and pretend like it is fine.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  For that kind of long-lived, low-maintainance, high-abuse machine, you can't just slap in a nice-looking OLED screen from AliBaba, you have to find one that you have confidence that will still work after 10 years in the sun while being abused daily by the public. Also at the time the system was designed (possibly pre-smartphones), I remember lots of machines like it, incurring train ticket machines with touchscreen keyboards, had alphabetical keyboards. I suspect there was a recommendation that not everyone, such as very old people, would be familiar with QWERTY. I also suspect that in the intervening decade or so, it was realised that actually no-one can use a 2D alphabetical layout at all, because the alphabet is linear and presenting it a grid didn't work. So actually alphabetical is pretty bad for everyone. But it's also the lowest common denominator. Sadly, once you've shipped a device like this, no one will pay you to go around and replace very expensive ruggedised keyboards just to make typing easier.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    Except that's not what is actually put in these things. It's still just whatever is the cheapest thing on Alibaba. Looks good in the meetings with city council, but give it a few months outside and it becomes nearly unreadable.
  - lbriner 4y ago
    Why does it have to work for 10 years? Make the parts replaceable and service the machines. The machines in the shade work for 10 years and those in the sun get a £5 replacement every 6 months.
    - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      A low-volume replacement screen assembly, even with a bottom tier screen, will not be £5. Even just having the machine company receive the part and forward it on without any testing, further assembly, or anything would cost more than that in postage alone. Plus the service fee for getting a service technician out to the machine (I imagine at least £100 a visit), plus the admin overhead of detecting failures and scheduling visits and lost downtime income would make that an extremely hard sell to a council. Hundreds of pounds per machine per year. And then multiply by every other element that you skimp on, and the thing will be broken continuously after the first 6 months, while sapping thousands in parts and labour.
- defanor 4y ago
  The alphabet has been around for even longer though. QWERTY, along with key staggering, seems to be useful for backwards compatibility with typewriters, or perhaps with those who learned on backwards-compatible computer keyboards, but this keyboard isn't close to that of a typewriter either way, not likely to be used any similarly. And I suspect that random people on a street are more likely to know the alphabet, rather than the QWERTY layout. The screen indeed looks like it'd be tricky and annoying to read.
base698 4y ago
Seems like one row of numbers would suffice. Enter stall. How many minutes? Pay $2.
- jffry 4y ago
  These machines (at least the one I have used in Cambridge MA) have you pay by entering your license plate instead of parking spot number. Even in places that only have numeric plates I assume they are not going to make a numbers-only version of the machine
  - base698 4y ago
    I've seen a lot that go by stall number and it prints the receipt you put on your dash. Saw one recent that did license plate.
- analog31 4y ago
  My hunch is they require you to enter your license plate number, so you can't hand off your spot to another driver when you leave before your time is up.
  - sligor 4y ago
    In fact the main goal of the plate number is to use cameras with plate number recognition to automatically generate the fines
- lbriner 4y ago
  It is both to stop tickets being transferred but is also to help the number of complaints about "I bought a ticket but it fell off my dashboard". At least this way, it is easy to check. Also, if you use the app, you don't need to use the machine although for some reason, we seem to have at least 10 different parking apps in the UK. Not sure who decides that we need another parking app.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
hairofadog 4y ago
People are focusing on the layout of the keyboard, but in my opinion the real problem is that there are eight different potential points of interaction (three walls of text, the alphanumeric keyboard, a credit card slot, an ATM-style keypad, a tap-to-pay interface, and whatever the concave section in the lower left is) and it’s not clear where to start or what you’re supposed to do in what order; it’s an assault on the senses. There are instructions in one of the walls of text, but not the first wall of text — those are terms and conditions. I think it could be way better if it was slightly reorganized so the instructions were clear and positioned near the point of interaction they were describing (“1. Enter plate number (or whatever) here. 2. Enter payment here. 3. Take ticket and place on dash.”) I don’t claim to be the best at it but I design UIs pretty frequently and one thing I’ve learned is that nobody reads anything if it’s more than one or two words; they just start pressing buttons by intuition and proceed by trial and error, and there are a lot of buttons to get lost in here.

At first glance, the keyboard layout? The QWERTY layout has been around for much longer than this machine, so why not use it? The screen is barely readable too. I'm sure the software is equally terrible and slow as hell.

padjo 4y ago
We have similar machines here and the input is extremely unreliable and laggy, I.e buttons work maybe 30% of the time and it takes about a second to perform an action. I’m sure you can imagine how frustrating that is to use the first few times.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Yea, this is, in some ways, the biggest UX issue, though something the designer likely had no control over. These machines are just unbearably slow, and I have no idea why. It seems crazy that something like typing in your plate number would take most of a second per character, which is made even worse by a lack of feedback if the button press was accepted, so you often double-type, which leads to corrections, which also take forever.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    I think the problem is that the implementation of the system is outsourced to companies who have more expertise navigating government bureaucracy than actually building good software. All the money gets spent on papers and endless meetings (and maybe passed under the table if not outright handed over if in a jurisdiction where corruption aka "lobbying" is legal) so there isn't much left to pay to attract & retain good talent. A few months/years down the line, even the sub-par talent working on it will probably realize how terrible their product is, but speaking up would be akin to admitting defeat (and might have career risks), so nobody says anything and congratulates themselves for having "delivered" the project. When the end client receives the deliverable the same situation applies, it's too late to backpedal even though the product is shit, so they also keep quiet and pretend like it is fine.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
For that kind of long-lived, low-maintainance, high-abuse machine, you can't just slap in a nice-looking OLED screen from AliBaba, you have to find one that you have confidence that will still work after 10 years in the sun while being abused daily by the public. Also at the time the system was designed (possibly pre-smartphones), I remember lots of machines like it, incurring train ticket machines with touchscreen keyboards, had alphabetical keyboards. I suspect there was a recommendation that not everyone, such as very old people, would be familiar with QWERTY. I also suspect that in the intervening decade or so, it was realised that actually no-one can use a 2D alphabetical layout at all, because the alphabet is linear and presenting it a grid didn't work. So actually alphabetical is pretty bad for everyone. But it's also the lowest common denominator. Sadly, once you've shipped a device like this, no one will pay you to go around and replace very expensive ruggedised keyboards just to make typing easier.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  Except that's not what is actually put in these things. It's still just whatever is the cheapest thing on Alibaba. Looks good in the meetings with city council, but give it a few months outside and it becomes nearly unreadable.
- lbriner 4y ago
  Why does it have to work for 10 years? Make the parts replaceable and service the machines. The machines in the shade work for 10 years and those in the sun get a £5 replacement every 6 months.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    A low-volume replacement screen assembly, even with a bottom tier screen, will not be £5. Even just having the machine company receive the part and forward it on without any testing, further assembly, or anything would cost more than that in postage alone. Plus the service fee for getting a service technician out to the machine (I imagine at least £100 a visit), plus the admin overhead of detecting failures and scheduling visits and lost downtime income would make that an extremely hard sell to a council. Hundreds of pounds per machine per year. And then multiply by every other element that you skimp on, and the thing will be broken continuously after the first 6 months, while sapping thousands in parts and labour.
defanor 4y ago
The alphabet has been around for even longer though. QWERTY, along with key staggering, seems to be useful for backwards compatibility with typewriters, or perhaps with those who learned on backwards-compatible computer keyboards, but this keyboard isn't close to that of a typewriter either way, not likely to be used any similarly. And I suspect that random people on a street are more likely to know the alphabet, rather than the QWERTY layout. The screen indeed looks like it'd be tricky and annoying to read.

base698 4y ago

Seems like one row of numbers would suffice. Enter stall. How many minutes? Pay $2.

jffry 4y ago
These machines (at least the one I have used in Cambridge MA) have you pay by entering your license plate instead of parking spot number. Even in places that only have numeric plates I assume they are not going to make a numbers-only version of the machine
- base698 4y ago
  I've seen a lot that go by stall number and it prints the receipt you put on your dash. Saw one recent that did license plate.
analog31 4y ago
My hunch is they require you to enter your license plate number, so you can't hand off your spot to another driver when you leave before your time is up.
- sligor 4y ago
  In fact the main goal of the plate number is to use cameras with plate number recognition to automatically generate the fines
lbriner 4y ago
It is both to stop tickets being transferred but is also to help the number of complaints about "I bought a ticket but it fell off my dashboard". At least this way, it is easy to check. Also, if you use the app, you don't need to use the machine although for some reason, we seem to have at least 10 different parking apps in the UK. Not sure who decides that we need another parking app.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago

hairofadog 4y ago

People are focusing on the layout of the keyboard, but in my opinion the real problem is that there are eight different potential points of interaction (three walls of text, the alphanumeric keyboard, a credit card slot, an ATM-style keypad, a tap-to-pay interface, and whatever the concave section in the lower left is) and it’s not clear where to start or what you’re supposed to do in what order; it’s an assault on the senses. There are instructions in one of the walls of text, but not the first wall of text — those are terms and conditions. I think it could be way better if it was slightly reorganized so the instructions were clear and positioned near the point of interaction they were describing (“1. Enter plate number (or whatever) here. 2. Enter payment here. 3. Take ticket and place on dash.”) I don’t claim to be the best at it but I design UIs pretty frequently and one thing I’ve learned is that nobody reads anything if it’s more than one or two words; they just start pressing buttons by intuition and proceed by trial and error, and there are a lot of buttons to get lost in here.