I feel like you don't get to piss all over the design if you've never built a physical interface that has to be weatherproof on an exposed device that holds money.
I feel like every interface designer should be forced to watch, clockwork orange-style as uninitiated users attempt to navigate their creations before they are unleashed on the public.
Well then why don’t you fix them after said testing? There is literally no excuse for taking over a second to respond to a button press. A ZX Spectrum would be more responsive than most of these stupid machines.
Also it must last for, say, 15 years, be installable by road workers, and deal with abuse from not only the theives, but also vandals and construction workers repairing the road and pavement nearby.
I'd say it's still super easy to vandalize though, by just squeezing a tube of superglue into e.g. the card slot, making sure one isn't caught on CCTV of course.
Luckily, most vandalism doesn't appear to be committed by people with the intelligence to cause real damage, they just spray paint their initials on it, try to set the metal box on fire or scratch or dent the case.
There's only so much one can do to defend a 1mm slot that has to accept a plastic card (ditto for coin slots).
That's part of the issue though, isn't it? Someone paints over the keyboard and you have no idea where anything is because it's not a normal layout for a keyboard. If it was QWERTY and then a numpad, some people would be able to use it blindly, or pull up their phone to check positions.
Like I said above, it's probably an idea that an alphabetical layout is somewhat familiar to everyone, but a QWERTY layout is only familiar to people who type. Not that long ago, fewer people than you might expect were familiar with QWERTY keyboards (no smartphones before about 2006). These machines are also for use by people who have never used a computer or smartphone, and, incurring the elderly people that councils have to consider, they exist.
I'm guessing at their reasoning, but "everyone knows QWERTY" is probably not as true as you think, or if it is, it hasn't been so for that long.
It could also be an international company that doesn't want to have SKUs for the keypad for every region (eg France uses AZERTY).
I'm not sure this is true though. As said elsewhere in these comments, the full-keyboard version of this machine is fairly new (last 5-10 years to my memory). It used to just be an up/down arrow for adjusting how much time you wanted, and then it printed a sticker to add to your car window. The new version with the full keyboard is so they can just drive by and scan your license plate and ticket you that way if you overstay your payment.
It's not like these are machines from the 90s when not that many people had computers. The addition of the keyboard is specifically something that was done because wireless internet and computer vision improved enough to do away wit the older version.
I'd be earnestly curious what percentage of the population that lives in an area with controlled parking like this doesn't interact with a keyboard at least weekly. Even my 99 year old grandfather was sending emails from his computer a decade ago from his farm in the rural US. The target demographic here is A. People who own cars B. who need to park them in urban areas with street parking. Both of those are, for the last decade, likely to own a smartphone, I'd imagine.
This isn't about security or being weatherproof. This is about basics, like using a QWERTY keyboard that everyone's familiar with, and clear instructions that are easy to follow. I work in tech and each time I see one of these I'm glad I can pay by smartphone.
Obviously, where else would you find such pettiness?
Relying upon a machine that is so complex and frustrating to use far outweighs the tiny loss of revenue for when people pass on unused parking time to someone else.
TIL that no layouts put 0 as first digit. Not US, UK, FR, German or so.
Somehow I thought the opposite, I was sure that my layout (Hungarian[1]) is about the same as every other, most probably a direct copy of the German, but nah.
Earlier typewriters didn’t have 0 and 1 keys [1] and instead the O and l keys did double duty. When 0 and 1 keys were finally added on typewriters, there probably wasn’t enough space to add them both on the left side. The fact that the previously used O key is to the right may also have been a factor.
It needs to be vandalproof because every time I use one I feel the need to hit the stupid thing. Luckily I'm pretty mild-mannered, but I'm sure many are not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> high-abuse machine, you can't just slap in a nice-looking OLED screen from AliBaba
OLED isn't the only screen technology and it's not what would look best in this environment. The best would be eink which has higher contrast in the sun. Eink can also be put behind weather proofing and be fine. It also doesn't draw power at idle.
I wish I could work on fixing all of the IoT gear that governments install.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a French company (Parkeon, now known as Flowbird) that historically made mechanical parking meters. I worked there for a while, if you think this version is bad you should see the "next gen" tactile one!
Ha, I was in Italy last year and literally tried to get a parking ticket from one of those machines for 10 minutes, without success. The only instructions were some words in Italian, which I vaguely translated as "enter the number". The number of the parking space? Nope. Maybe the number of hours? Nope. Maybe the time until I want the space? Nope. Maybe the amount of cash it should take from my credit card? Nope. Maybe it was stuck in a previous transaction and the "number" was the PIN? Maybe the machine was in some kind of admin maintenance mode and was expecting a password? Nope, the next machine asked for the same "number". Maybe all the machines were broken? Nope, there were cars with a ticket behind the front window. I talked to another group of tourists with exactly the same problem, but 7 people were not enough brainpower to figure the machine out.
While I finally walked back to car to tell the family in shame that I was, indeed, not able to use a ticket machine successfully, it suddenly hit me: the machine expects the license plate number!
In Calgary I've used a parking machine that asked for a lot number. That is on a sign as you enter the parking lot. As if this machine could not be programmed to already know which lot of was permanently installed in.
I believe that the second button in the bottom row, "flags icons", should be the language.
But honestly, after reading the post I thought I would just glance at the picture and see clear indications for "change language" instructions, the same way a proofreader takes moments to find what the writer will just not see until pointed. Instead, it did take me an unexpected amount of time, and I still feel that option as well concealed.
About 22 years ago, we began doing our best to obsolete those things. To the degree you want to pay for parking, lol, the preferred device has long been in your pocket IMO!† Cofounder, PayByPhone here.
As someone pointed out, the engineering required to harden those (against thieves, vandals, weather) is impressive. Thus, the amount of money your cities, universities, airports, etc. pay up front for paystations and then annually in mandatory maintenance contracts (that's where the real money is made) ... ugh.
I'm not saying our UI & UX over the years are without flaws (IVR, WML, SMS, & finally apps) but at least you're not standing in the weather or leaving your appointments to feed the beast.
† Added: Actually, the best payment interaction might be no interaction but the whole always-connected-and-location-aware-car wasn't on our roadmap in 2000. The scene is ripe for change again IMO.
The apps aren't much better. I got an App error the other day so I paid cash in the machine, it turns out I had paid on the App but still got the error. Also problems setting up some of them (Have to run a number and waste 5 minutes when you just want to pay and park).
My rant over software in general is that we have rushed to get features into things without investing the correct amount of time handling errors and making UX as slick as possible.
But this means you need to require anyone who wants to park must 1. have a smart phone of the appropriate type and 2. be comfortable installing an app (possibly one they only just now found out about and haven't had time to research). Since clearly this isn't reasonable, you'll still need to have those paystations (though less of them?)
Nope. IVR (voice & touch tones) has always been an option. i.e. "Enter the location number on the sign. Enter how many minutes you wish to park for." We invested a lot to ensure dumbphone compatibility. Some say it's faster than an app.
Ah, I wasn't aware of this. I don't know that I've ever seen it, but I appreciate that it does exist. Kudos for putting the thought, time, and effort into handling that case.
As a Vancouver resident, it’s always a bit of a relief when you notice the green dots on the meter and don’t have to fiddle with a credit card machine.
These pay-by-app parking setups are everywhere in Sweden, each parking owner has their own app, so you run around with a dozen shady parking apps on your phone.
It seems that is now being replaced by the app being optional - if you don’t do anything and just park and leave, you get a bill in the mail for the time your car was parked, based on license plate recognition. No signups, no parking tickets, just park and leave.
> if you don’t do anything and just park and leave, you get a bill in the mail for the time your car was parked, based on license plate recognition. No signups, no parking tickets, just park and leave
I like this. It's civilized. As I said, the best interaction today could be no interaction.
One way or another, convenience means you're probably trusting someone with information and linking it to an account or address or payment mechanism. For city governments, maybe this is okay. For commercial destinations and sketchy parking operators ... maybe not.
I wouldn't be surprised if some parking operations factor in a certain percentage of fines into their revenue model so that making everyone pay (and thus no more fines) would actually decrease their profits.
The problem is that moving things online/app means there's now an opportunity for "engagement" to creep in. It's only a matter of time before you need to create an account, agree to a privacy policy, share telemetry and receive "offers" (aka spam) just to be able to pay for parking.
The objective no longer becomes to be a tool to help the user pay for parking but to generate "engagement" in order to justify employees' salaries (and potential VC funding) and monopolize the parking payment market.
I just checked your website and indeed it's asking me to agree to ToS, privacy & cookie policy - I'd rather fight with the old-school machine. According to the privacy policy you're also selling aggregated analytics data - that's a huge downgrade from "insert coin to pay for parking".
The old-school approach, with all its flaws, just takes payment and no other identifying information and leaves no opportunities for marketing/product to mark their territory.
Many ATMs now have a "please wait..." screen which pauses for a few seconds... to show you a random ad.
All of these are textbook examples of how markets actually add friction.
You could have a single centralised ATM/payment network with a national or even global transaction standard for different application UIs, hardware, and software.
But instead everyone duplicates effort to build their own version, some of the versions have exploitative features, and the job is done poorly - although no doubt it's profitable for the shareholders.
- changing the random ad to a recommendation based on your credit card and parking history (and car age and type, derived from camera, or from the license plate)
- a quiz question to check that you watched the ad
- a subscription with your credit card company to get checkouts without ads
Depends where you live. Here (Munich, Germany) all street parking is actually done and accounted for by the city and for a few years we've actually had a quite awesome system that I am 100% happy with. Just as if it this was not Germany where you often can't pay without cash :D
So it's an app where you use the same account to log in that you can use for public transport, and the geolocation so far has always matched me up with the correct parking spot and I can just start (by-minute pricing) and stop again, it reminds me if I forgot to check out and it gets paid from my billing info that is in that account, same as when I take the subway.
Now if we're talking about private parking lots, that's where I am probably ok to keep on using cash or card, and nothing with an account.
The incentives are different if it's built & maintained by the government, so less pressure for "growth & engagement". You're lucky to be in an area where the problem has been tackled by your government (and they seem to have done a good job) as opposed to offloaded to a private company like here in the UK.
It usually goes like this… get out phone, download the app, need Apple password to add an app can’t use face id, checkmate my apple password is too secure to remember. I don’t have time to reset and it’s a PITA anyway. Even if you have the app you can suffer from the combo of poor cell reception and wifi with no internet hijacking your connection
Yeah the whole app thing can go die. There is 0 good reason why it can't just be a web site. And as somebody who doesn't pay for a lot of data because I don't use it much your shitty 100MB app just ate a very significant chunk of what I had for the month. Oh and now it's taking up space on my phone, unless I want to burn data to download it again next time.
I agree with a number of points in other replies to your comment, but I do think your app is the best that I've used out of the many I've ended up installing, so kudos for that.
Appreciate that. In theory, a company's offering should improve over two decades and hundreds of millions of user interactions. (If it's paying attention.) I have moved on so credit now goes to a large and apparently excellent team.
> To the degree you want to pay for parking, lol, the preferred device has long been in your pocket
I think that using Apps can be very reasonable and easier to use in many situations, but I also think that accessibility standards ought to be different when you're a government. If cash and coins are legal tender, then they should be acceptable as payment in some fashion.
On the whole, what bothers me most about many parking apps is that they are apps. I don't want to have to download apps and register user accounts. Ideally I'd like to scan a QR code that takes me to a checkout page _without user registration_ where I can just enter the relevant details, Apple Pay and done. You don't need to know my name, address, phone number or email address — no other parking ticket machine in the world would ask for these. Anything more than my vehicle registration and payment method is overcomplicating it.
FWIW, the person you're responding to mostly solves this. It's a website, and while they do ask for an email they don't validate it.
That said, I did end up with a ticket because I parked in their space, phone was dead, and machine was broken. I charged my phone as soon as possible to pay, but it was too late.
That's not really typical of most of his work, which is really sleek and quite beautiful (IMHO). I reckon a Mead designed a parking meter would look like a chrome robot valet. There would be no buttons.
Folk are getting hung up on the keyboard layout and poor buttons, which are bad but only the start of the problems with these machines.
It has two separate asynchronous screens, two sets of printed instructions (plus t&cs), more instructions on both screens, then two keypads (but with the same symbols although they're not interoperable). There is no consistent self-explanatory language for talking about the various buttons, knobs, slots and problems, and how the user's attention should flow between them. If use of this machine wasn't mandated, nobody would ever, ever touch it.
The instructions are also terrible. The text is quite small, and is in a grubby box which is hard to read, especially for those with poor sight. The signposting of the distinction between the three sets of instructions (coins vs credit/debit vs contactless) is very unclear. There are T&Cs right at the top of the machine in tiny letters that are downright impossible for people with poor sight - for those with good sight, that’s not a problem, we ignore them anyway, but how does someone with poor sight know they don’t need to read them? What are “controlled hours”?
It’s a total shitshow without even starting on the tech. Why is there an on-off button? Why is there a double flag button? Why is there a rotating button? Why is the wheelchair button not mentioned anywhere in the instructions?
I love this little app used in Ottawa called PayByPhone. It saves your plate and uses GPS to find the closest parking meter code. It’s much more elegant than using these clumsy machines, and it’s paperless since the meter maids just scan your plate anyway.
We have that one in the UK too, as well as a couple of others (RingGo etc). A few are pretty mediocre as apps but get the job done, but some are genuinely pretty good, with notifications when your time is almost up.
I was going to write that these machines are easy to use and the interface is logical. But then I looked at the instructions and realized that the operator requires that the license plate should be entered as a first step. The rest of the interface flows from that IMO stupid requirement (alphanumeric keypad, long usage instructions). However, there is still an obvious main display and main keypad that you start the process on.
The separate display and numeric keyboard unit is obviously part of the card reader that you only need to interact with if you want to pay with a card. Its presence as an entirely isolated unit within the machine is mandated by payment processors. It is a separately certified secure enclave that shields the card payment authorization process from the rest of the system so your information, most importantly your PIN, can't leak.
The text on the machine is actually well structured: T&C glued on at the very top. The usage instructions are in the wide top window. The smaller window to the side details the parking fees.
> Its presence as an entirely isolated unit within the machine is mandated by payment processors. It is a separately certified secure enclave that shields the card payment authorization process from the rest of the system so your information, most importantly your PIN, can't leak.
There's absolutely a way to get (non-sensitive) display output out of it so they can reuse the main screen for display at least (fast food self-checkout machines do this in my area - the status display from the card terminal is replicated on the main screen during the payment process).
They need the license plate because they control for illegally parked cars and send fines by scanning plates with image recognition. I don't see another way to achieve that.
Not sure how widespread it is, but here (italy) we have little barcode scanners where you just scan each item you're buying and put it in the cart. At checkout you scan a qr code, gives you a total, pay with contactless card and you're done. It's a pleasure to use. And you also have a display with the updated list and subtotal of everything you're buying.
The real evil part is that you're required to enter your license plate. Because heaven forbid that you pay for a parking spot, leave early, and someone else uses the 5 extra minutes that you'd already paid for.
I suspect the license plates are stored and sold (in hashed form if we're at all lucky) so some adtech company can use it as another datapoint in their quest for eyeballs.
Before these there used to be street vendors that would storm to anyone getting out a park to get the partially used ticket, they would then try to gift them to new parkers in exchange for a tip. It was quite annoying but entering the license plate and generally using these things is way worse.
I work at the railroads, some traveler needed a ticket but couldn't figure out the machine. I couldn't figure it out either as I never use it. I gather other railroad employees and no one could make sense of it. We eventually just wrote them a paper ticket (intended for when the machines are broken)
It must have been a week later when it struck me the thing must have been out of ticket paper and just hid all the functionality. The remaining functions were for putting a trip on a kind of credit card that more frequent travelers use but as such card was not inserted the menus were "limited" to a forest of various kinds of discount cards and alternative means of travel like adding a metro or bus trip.
Every time I pay Park Mobile $5/hour for beach parking, it logs me out and wastes 15min of my time dealing with BS.
The current parking situation is an obvious microcosm of the rent-seeking-complex/delirium that's, imho, one of the biggest issues we as a society face.
We've watched our local (seaside town) carparks turn to an absolute shit show with the arrival of these. Before: insert money, get ticket. Now: type registration number (on non qwerty keyboard), lots of to-ing and fro-ing as person / spouse tries to remember registration number; hop between totally non intuitive set of screens trying to figure out how to pay; ticket eventually drops out through badly designed slot and is blown away on the sea breeze.
Meanwhile: ad companies presumably hoover up registration marketing data and sell it on.
What also drives me nuts is the "soft" element that has been removed. In the old days you bought a space and then had that nice interaction with other people if you left early when you could give them your ticket.
Not only is this new approach profit maximisation at the expense of ease of use, it's also profit maximisation at the expense of social contact.
Legally, I'd be interested to know if anyone's done the work on what renting a space looks like. I mean, I've paid for that space for one hour so if I leave after half an hour, don't I have a say over giving my ticket to a random...?
The license plate is needed because they use image recognition (often mounted on a moving car) to check for illegally parked cars and send fines. The scan the plates and check whether they paid or not. It's much faster and cheaper than checking tickets manually.
* used violence against the one he used when he saw at the end of the process the message "communicating with server...", thinking "You are centrally logging the presence of my car here at this time? Who gave you permission?"
* and before that, during the operation, he had to note that the keys were capacitive: because in the middle of the pandemic, he was using thick paper cloth and other buffer to operate the keyboard, and it just would not work. And of course, those monsters, apparently planned to require "contact" for operation (everybody touching the same surface), were installed in the middle of the pandemic.
He resolved, as it may be expected, never again to park near the center of his hometown.
I worked as a contractor at Parkeon/Flowbird, on the next version.
IIRC, this one is called N² and runs a headless Android on a limited hardware, which explains the slowness of this thing.
The next version (called streetsmart) on which I worked 2 years ago is a real mess. It is based on Android 5.1 (Android 8 or 9 was available when the project started), and features a touch screen. There is absolutely no isolation between ticketing apps and maintenance apps (which allow among other things to withdraw the cash). A custom launcher gives access to one set of apps or another, depending on the current mode. An hardware token and a gesture allow agents to switch from vending mode to maintenance mode, but if one gains access to a shell, one just has to send particular intents to access to maintenance apps.
Some anecdotes:
- We shipped debug Android builds for internal testing (with root, adb enabled, etc) which somehow got sent to the customer, deployed on a public network and got infected by crypto miners. That triggered overheat of the CPU and reboots of the devices.
- Those are supposed to be deployed in Barcelona, I don't know if it's actually in production right now.
- Those were supposed to be deployed in NYC, but the deal got cancelled (not really a surprise to me).
- They run on a 12v car battery and a solar cell. I had a partial machine to dev (with no solar part), and I had to buy a car battery charger to power the battery.
The work itself was rather interesting (have you ever worked on a Android device that has a built-in printer and a cash machine?), but project management, collaboration between teams and vision were terrible. The main board seemed really well designed also.
> runs a headless Android on a limited hardware, which explains the slowness of this thing.
Does it? Must be very limited hardware, then. I haven’t even ever seen one of those, but I would think a parking meter UI wouldn’t be particularly taxing on hardware.
It's just that Android might be too much "heavy" for the actual hardware. I don't have any details, sorry. That's what I heard when I was working there.
I was not an employee so this could not be really accurate but, I would say:
- There was way too much bureaucracy.
- Software, security, design choices were decided by some kind of committee that didn't have sufficient expertise.
- Competition between teams.
- They wanted to do scrum, without knowing how to do it.
I think their actual expertise was focused on hardware design and manufacture (they build and assemble most of their hardware components in their own factory), and probably firmware devevelopment.
A lot of car parks here have switched to RingGo, but for some reason I just can't get it to work on my phone.
The verification SMS simply never comes though. I've tried calling them, and the customer service can't help, my phone provider can't help, and I've tried using other SIMs, changed my phone and it still doesn't work.
I just rely on my girlfriend's phone where it does work. It's an interesting case of the government forcing a dependency on private companies with no recourse if things don't go as planned.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadThere's only so much one can do to defend a 1mm slot that has to accept a plastic card (ditto for coin slots).
I'm guessing at their reasoning, but "everyone knows QWERTY" is probably not as true as you think, or if it is, it hasn't been so for that long.
It could also be an international company that doesn't want to have SKUs for the keypad for every region (eg France uses AZERTY).
But you also can't name a layout which is more familiar than QWERTY, and its regional variants (including AZERTY).
If you don't want to localize, US QWERTY would probably be the single most familiar layout globally.
It's not like these are machines from the 90s when not that many people had computers. The addition of the keyboard is specifically something that was done because wireless internet and computer vision improved enough to do away wit the older version.
I'd be earnestly curious what percentage of the population that lives in an area with controlled parking like this doesn't interact with a keyboard at least weekly. Even my 99 year old grandfather was sending emails from his computer a decade ago from his farm in the rural US. The target demographic here is A. People who own cars B. who need to park them in urban areas with street parking. Both of those are, for the last decade, likely to own a smartphone, I'd imagine.
Relying upon a machine that is so complex and frustrating to use far outweighs the tiny loss of revenue for when people pass on unused parking time to someone else.
Somehow I thought the opposite, I was sure that my layout (Hungarian[1]) is about the same as every other, most probably a direct copy of the German, but nah.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hungarian+keyboard+layout&iar=imag...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Olivetti...
His explanation was that they did not use AZERTY or QWERTY because it wouldn't work for foreigners.
The screen is barely readable too.
I'm sure the software is equally terrible and slow as hell.
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.
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.
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.
OLED isn't the only screen technology and it's not what would look best in this environment. The best would be eink which has higher contrast in the sun. Eink can also be put behind weather proofing and be fine. It also doesn't draw power at idle.
I wish I could work on fixing all of the IoT gear that governments install.
The screen indeed looks like it'd be tricky and annoying to read.
Even in places that only have numeric plates I assume they are not going to make a numbers-only version of the machine
Saw one recent that did license plate.
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.
So maybe Peugeot?
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.
While I finally walked back to car to tell the family in shame that I was, indeed, not able to use a ticket machine successfully, it suddenly hit me: the machine expects the license plate number!
(In my language, license plates are called number plates.)
But honestly, after reading the post I thought I would just glance at the picture and see clear indications for "change language" instructions, the same way a proofreader takes moments to find what the writer will just not see until pointed. Instead, it did take me an unexpected amount of time, and I still feel that option as well concealed.
As someone pointed out, the engineering required to harden those (against thieves, vandals, weather) is impressive. Thus, the amount of money your cities, universities, airports, etc. pay up front for paystations and then annually in mandatory maintenance contracts (that's where the real money is made) ... ugh.
I'm not saying our UI & UX over the years are without flaws (IVR, WML, SMS, & finally apps) but at least you're not standing in the weather or leaving your appointments to feed the beast.
† Added: Actually, the best payment interaction might be no interaction but the whole always-connected-and-location-aware-car wasn't on our roadmap in 2000. The scene is ripe for change again IMO.
My rant over software in general is that we have rushed to get features into things without investing the correct amount of time handling errors and making UX as slick as possible.
It seems that is now being replaced by the app being optional - if you don’t do anything and just park and leave, you get a bill in the mail for the time your car was parked, based on license plate recognition. No signups, no parking tickets, just park and leave.
I like this. It's civilized. As I said, the best interaction today could be no interaction.
One way or another, convenience means you're probably trusting someone with information and linking it to an account or address or payment mechanism. For city governments, maybe this is okay. For commercial destinations and sketchy parking operators ... maybe not.
The objective no longer becomes to be a tool to help the user pay for parking but to generate "engagement" in order to justify employees' salaries (and potential VC funding) and monopolize the parking payment market.
I just checked your website and indeed it's asking me to agree to ToS, privacy & cookie policy - I'd rather fight with the old-school machine. According to the privacy policy you're also selling aggregated analytics data - that's a huge downgrade from "insert coin to pay for parking".
The old-school approach, with all its flaws, just takes payment and no other identifying information and leaves no opportunities for marketing/product to mark their territory.
All of these are textbook examples of how markets actually add friction.
You could have a single centralised ATM/payment network with a national or even global transaction standard for different application UIs, hardware, and software.
But instead everyone duplicates effort to build their own version, some of the versions have exploitative features, and the job is done poorly - although no doubt it's profitable for the shareholders.
Thank goodness I've never seen this. Where are you that this is a thing?
- changing the random ad to a recommendation based on your credit card and parking history (and car age and type, derived from camera, or from the license plate)
- a quiz question to check that you watched the ad
- a subscription with your credit card company to get checkouts without ads
Progress! /s
So it's an app where you use the same account to log in that you can use for public transport, and the geolocation so far has always matched me up with the correct parking spot and I can just start (by-minute pricing) and stop again, it reminds me if I forgot to check out and it gets paid from my billing info that is in that account, same as when I take the subway.
Now if we're talking about private parking lots, that's where I am probably ok to keep on using cash or card, and nothing with an account.
I think that using Apps can be very reasonable and easier to use in many situations, but I also think that accessibility standards ought to be different when you're a government. If cash and coins are legal tender, then they should be acceptable as payment in some fashion.
It’s a nice app! Many parking apps are pretty utilitarian in nature but found PayByPhone very easy to use—it feels very well designed to me.
That said, I did end up with a ticket because I parked in their space, phone was dead, and machine was broken. I charged my phone as soon as possible to pay, but it was too late.
[1] https://i.redd.it/srztli5lbwo11.png
It has two separate asynchronous screens, two sets of printed instructions (plus t&cs), more instructions on both screens, then two keypads (but with the same symbols although they're not interoperable). There is no consistent self-explanatory language for talking about the various buttons, knobs, slots and problems, and how the user's attention should flow between them. If use of this machine wasn't mandated, nobody would ever, ever touch it.
It’s a total shitshow without even starting on the tech. Why is there an on-off button? Why is there a double flag button? Why is there a rotating button? Why is the wheelchair button not mentioned anywhere in the instructions?
Quite often the card reader isn't working and it takes about 90s to timeout; always relaxing when there's a queue forming.
The separate display and numeric keyboard unit is obviously part of the card reader that you only need to interact with if you want to pay with a card. Its presence as an entirely isolated unit within the machine is mandated by payment processors. It is a separately certified secure enclave that shields the card payment authorization process from the rest of the system so your information, most importantly your PIN, can't leak.
The text on the machine is actually well structured: T&C glued on at the very top. The usage instructions are in the wide top window. The smaller window to the side details the parking fees.
There's absolutely a way to get (non-sensitive) display output out of it so they can reuse the main screen for display at least (fast food self-checkout machines do this in my area - the status display from the card terminal is replicated on the main screen during the payment process).
I suspect the license plates are stored and sold (in hashed form if we're at all lucky) so some adtech company can use it as another datapoint in their quest for eyeballs.
I work at the railroads, some traveler needed a ticket but couldn't figure out the machine. I couldn't figure it out either as I never use it. I gather other railroad employees and no one could make sense of it. We eventually just wrote them a paper ticket (intended for when the machines are broken)
It must have been a week later when it struck me the thing must have been out of ticket paper and just hid all the functionality. The remaining functions were for putting a trip on a kind of credit card that more frequent travelers use but as such card was not inserted the menus were "limited" to a forest of various kinds of discount cards and alternative means of travel like adding a metro or bus trip.
The current parking situation is an obvious microcosm of the rent-seeking-complex/delirium that's, imho, one of the biggest issues we as a society face.
Meanwhile: ad companies presumably hoover up registration marketing data and sell it on.
What also drives me nuts is the "soft" element that has been removed. In the old days you bought a space and then had that nice interaction with other people if you left early when you could give them your ticket.
Not only is this new approach profit maximisation at the expense of ease of use, it's also profit maximisation at the expense of social contact.
Legally, I'd be interested to know if anyone's done the work on what renting a space looks like. I mean, I've paid for that space for one hour so if I leave after half an hour, don't I have a say over giving my ticket to a random...?
Under which legal agreement? "If you park, then you agree"? _Parking_ as a sufficient condition?
Now let us review why a "society" should make sense, and if some agents become a collective affront to natural rights the action should be collective.
In this case (and more), the apparent agent is the municipality - which shows the perversion of these days.
* used violence against the one he used when he saw at the end of the process the message "communicating with server...", thinking "You are centrally logging the presence of my car here at this time? Who gave you permission?"
* and before that, during the operation, he had to note that the keys were capacitive: because in the middle of the pandemic, he was using thick paper cloth and other buffer to operate the keyboard, and it just would not work. And of course, those monsters, apparently planned to require "contact" for operation (everybody touching the same surface), were installed in the middle of the pandemic.
He resolved, as it may be expected, never again to park near the center of his hometown.
As a social experiment they should try to maximize frustration by randomizing the keyboard layout and implementing ELIZA as the user interface.
IIRC, this one is called N² and runs a headless Android on a limited hardware, which explains the slowness of this thing.
The next version (called streetsmart) on which I worked 2 years ago is a real mess. It is based on Android 5.1 (Android 8 or 9 was available when the project started), and features a touch screen. There is absolutely no isolation between ticketing apps and maintenance apps (which allow among other things to withdraw the cash). A custom launcher gives access to one set of apps or another, depending on the current mode. An hardware token and a gesture allow agents to switch from vending mode to maintenance mode, but if one gains access to a shell, one just has to send particular intents to access to maintenance apps.
Some anecdotes:
- We shipped debug Android builds for internal testing (with root, adb enabled, etc) which somehow got sent to the customer, deployed on a public network and got infected by crypto miners. That triggered overheat of the CPU and reboots of the devices.
- Those are supposed to be deployed in Barcelona, I don't know if it's actually in production right now.
- Those were supposed to be deployed in NYC, but the deal got cancelled (not really a surprise to me).
- They run on a 12v car battery and a solar cell. I had a partial machine to dev (with no solar part), and I had to buy a car battery charger to power the battery.
The work itself was rather interesting (have you ever worked on a Android device that has a built-in printer and a cash machine?), but project management, collaboration between teams and vision were terrible. The main board seemed really well designed also.
Does it? Must be very limited hardware, then. I haven’t even ever seen one of those, but I would think a parking meter UI wouldn’t be particularly taxing on hardware.
It is just as ugly as you describe.
The rest of the whole parking enforcement/payment industry is probably full of really old incumbents like those two and an absolute shit show.
- There was way too much bureaucracy.
- Software, security, design choices were decided by some kind of committee that didn't have sufficient expertise.
- Competition between teams.
- They wanted to do scrum, without knowing how to do it.
I think their actual expertise was focused on hardware design and manufacture (they build and assemble most of their hardware components in their own factory), and probably firmware devevelopment.
The verification SMS simply never comes though. I've tried calling them, and the customer service can't help, my phone provider can't help, and I've tried using other SIMs, changed my phone and it still doesn't work.
I just rely on my girlfriend's phone where it does work. It's an interesting case of the government forcing a dependency on private companies with no recourse if things don't go as planned.