Train Tickets, Rethought
March 15th, 2007
Yesterday I talked about how train tickets miserably fail their passengers. To that end, we’ve come up with how we think train tickets should be done. Partly as a design excercise, partly as a demonstration that even some of the most basic things we use in everyday life can be improved, but mainly as a lot of fun to challenge ourselves with a difficult task, here’s our vision.
Some of the things that loomed large in our minds as we designed these:
- Language Free- anyone should be able to understand the tickets
- Clarity of Critical Information – what number train? what platform? is this my ticket to milan or florence? Can I easily see everything I need to know just by glancing at the ticket?
- Clear Instructions on Validating – frantically hunting for a ticket machine when your ticket should be stamped by the conductor wastes valuable minutes before your train departs
- The life of a ticket – taking into account use by both the passenger and the conductor
Approximately 30 iterations, several real-life limitations and considering over 20 different factors brought the mockup above. If you want to read in more depth about our how we conceived and designed of this, follow the link below to the in-depth description.
Link to project page with more information.
Popularity: 3% [?]
March 16th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
[...] Vestal Design has an interesting look at how train tickets (and probably tickets in general) can be …. I don’t take the train very often, but I know that tickets for just about anything are as confusing as ever. Take airplane tickets and concert tickets for example. Both kinds of tickets are basically all text, with either zero or very little graphical interpretations. This means that someone would have to take the time out to read, or at least skim over, every line of the ticket before finding out the specific information he/she may want to know (ie: seat number, location, destination, arrival/departure time, etc.). Also, there’s a good point about the life expectancy of most standard issue tickets: they suck. Paper quality is almost always utter crap and most of the time you can’t put a ticket in your purse or wallet without having it rip or get folded into a paper airplane. To remedy the situation, Vestal Design has suggested using large graphic icons (universally recognizable or at least interpretable) as well as a color scheme of some sort. Check out the rest of the project to redesign tickets here. [...]
March 20th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
This is a very cool design. One issue I can see, though, is the date. It’s not totally language-free since we use MM/DD/YYYY in the U.S., instead of DD/MM/YYYY. Maybe different calendar-based icons could denote which number is the month and which the day.
March 21st, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Thanks. We actually had that debate about what to do with the dates and came to consensus that since we’re showing the time in the 24hr format (see the project page), it would appropriate to have the date simply follow the same localization conventions without explanation. We couldn’t think of a good graphical representation for month/day, and having the first letter M, D (or M, G in Italian) is useless.
April 1st, 2007 at 7:23 am
yes