Usability : Train Tickets
This is a rant. You can safely ignore it.
Last weekend we took the train to Arundel, spending a day in London on the way to see Snow Patrol at the O2, do some shopping, eat at Bill’s etc.
This journey generated about a zillion tickets, but that’s nothing new anymore. But I wanted to point out the two tickets that were our journey back on the Sunday, from London to Norwich.
OK. So the first really annoying thing about this is that there are two tickets. One is the actual ticket, the other is a reservation coupon. Not a seat reservation, mind you, more of a restriction coupon. We had to get that 1652 train. But the journey origin is different on the coupon from the ticket. Presumably we could get whatever train we liked from London, as long as we got to Cambridge in time to get the 1652. We didn’t test this theory by, for instance, going first thing in the morning and doing some shopping, but I guess it would have been OK.
This discrepancy by itself nearly caused an argument. Yes, it’s obvious now. It’s less obvious when you’re trying to sort out 20 tickets that have just been spat out the machine, to make sure you aren’t missing any.
Anyway…
That wasn’t really what I wanted to say.
Which one of those nearly identical pieces of card, is the ticket, and which one is the reservation? It’s not obvious, and it’s made much less obvious by the fact that the ticket has the word reservation at the top of it, and the reservation has the word ticket at the top of it.
When you glance at your tickets in a rush (because the only time you EVER look at your tickets is when the ticket inspector has just woken you up and now you’re keeping him waiting, or when you need to get through the barrier and now you’re keeping everyone else waiting) it’s really easy to get the two mixed up, because you scan the top of the ticket and mentally make exactly the wrong connection.
I know the coupon says at the bottom that it’s a “mandatory reservation coupon 1 or 1” – but that isn’t what your brain sees at a quick glance.
I don’t understand why they couldn’t put the information that resides on the reservation somewhere on the ticket – maybe under the validity heading?
Basically, I’m saying it’s poor design, poor user experience. I’m aware of the laughably old infrastructure that still supports ticket issuing in this country (you can just tell really can’t you), but it’s not the system that’s at fault. When the ‘new style’ of tickets came out (late 1980’s) it didn’t look too bad – but since then more and more information has been crushed onto the ticket.
I guess in the past, when you booked in advance, you only chose your day, you didn’t choose the exact train. I don’t know why that’s changed. I’m sure it’s probably just a money-making thing… especially as there’s no fixed upper limit on the number of tickets you can purchase for a given journey [anyone can buy an open single and get on any train] so it isn’t for capacity reasons.
Written by Tom Morgan
Tom is a Microsoft Teams Platform developer and Microsoft MVP who has been blogging for over a decade. Find out more.
In the past when you booked in advance you would be booked on a specific train, but the tickets would be issued as a larger, “airline” style ticket which had room for the necessary information. These fell out of favour due to the proliferation of automatic barriers designed for our normal, credit-card sized tickets (and automatic ticket machines which print on such ticket stock).
Personally, I would favour using larger airline tickets for clarity – the barrier issue is not relevant really as barriers cannot tell which time train you are booked on. I don’t think this is likely to happen though, and there simply isn’t space to fit all the information on one ticket. Tickets are currently being redesigned, which will roll out over the coming year, but don’t expect anything too drastic.
Smartcard systems are slowly being brought in which are claimed to simplify ticketing; whether this is how it will work out remains to be seen. It may serve only to further hide the relevant details of a ticket from the passenger.
Oh, and finally, with an Advance ticket such as the one in your example, it’s a mistake to think of one part being the “ticket” and the other being the “reservation”. Without the reservation, the ticket is worthless, so they must be kept together.