CASE STUDY - TICKET VENDING MACHINE

ISTANBUL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

2012 - 2013

PROJECT OVERVIEW

This NGO project was conducted with the collaboration of BELBIM, the information technology company of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, and Istanbul Technical University Institute of Science and Technology.

The project is a quantitative UX research of the ticket vending machines (TVM) designed and developed by BELBIM. It is about finding out the effectivity, usability performance and ergonomics of the machines.

It consists of the following steps:

Literature review, observation and interviews with BELBIM
Defining hypothesis
Selection of the methodology and techniques
Questionnaire design (a large-scale survey design)
Conducting the questionnaire
Coding and analysing
Synthesis - Key insights

GOAL AND OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this research was to conduct UX research for the ticket vending machines on the Istanbul Public Transport.

In the research, we aimed to get answers of;

What are people's preferences for buying tickets on public transport?
How often do people use TVM's instead of conventional selling points?
What is their opinion about the ergonomics of the machines?
What do people think about the design of the machines?
How often do disabled people use the machines or can they use them?

TEAM

Prof. Dr Nigan Bayazit,

Institute of Science and Technology | Istanbul Technical University

Zeynep Ertugral,

Design Researcher, Institute of Science and Technology | Istanbul Technical University

Eylem Yilmaz

Design Researcher, Institute of Science and Technology | Istanbul Technical University

Eylem Yilmaz: Design Researcher

Literature review and observation

Conducting interviews with BELBIM

Designing questionnaire

Conducting a large-sample questionnaire online

Coding and analysing

Final discussion drawing insights

THE SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

According to the literature search and meeting with the Belbim workers and our observations, we defined the scope of the project as follows:

a) Interior design:

Basic feature functionality
The content of the software
System performance
Monitoring skills
System updates
Efficiency

b) Outdoor design:

Usability of indicators like buttons, user guide or voice system
Ergonomics of the outer shell
Cash/card import/export behaviour

INTERVIEW WITH BELBIM

We organised a meeting with BELBIM workers to conduct an interview to see their view about the design of TVM's.

Have you considered how people with disabilities would use the machines?

Do you think that voice guidance is noisy?

Have you considered to use touchpad screens for the machines?

FEEDBACK

"Disabled people should not get tickets for public transportation systems. For this reason, we do not think about the ergonomics of disabled people for the design process of this machine."

"Turkish users usually prefer listening instead of reading."

"It is more complicated in touch screen and everybody do not familiar with that. It is preferred to be simpler and faster."

HYPOTHESIS

Most people are happy to use TVM's because they are making their life easier.

Outdoor design of TVM is too large. It takes up more space. This makes it difficult to move the body if any maintenance needed.

The interface design of TVM is too colourful and some user flows are complicated. This makes people find it exhausting.

Voice guidance of TVM is designed to assist people to use. But this makes people uncomfortable when TVM's are positioned side by side. So it may shut off.

There is no option to 'pay with card'.

There is no option to top up monthly travel cards even if they are widely used by students, who are representing the majority of the users.

TVM's are running slowly. Speed of performance should be improved.

METHODOLOGY

In this study, we selected the following quantitative research techniques:

Observation (for both user interface and outdoor designs)
Questionnaire

We used different sampling methods for the 738-subject questionnaire :

'probability sampling' method to analyze data coming from participators that have different age and profession

Majority of the participators consisted of university students and engineers. Therefore, we had a piece of sufficient information to select purposive sampling as;

'non-probability sampling' in order to illustrate characteristics of some particular subgroups like 'ITU students' or 'Netas software engineers'.

We mainly used 'simple random sampling', because TVM's were located in common areas and they were available to use for all genres, ages and professions that include our questionnaire subjects.

We also used the 'stratified sampling' method, because the majority of the participations were students and engineers and their expectations from TVM's had some differences. Therefore, we divided the population into two different groups as Students and Engineers.

QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN

We prepared close-ended questions to enable the participants to choose the option closest to their thought.

Question types we designed are as follows:

Demographic questions
Multiple choice questions
Rating scale questions
Likert scale questions
Matrix questions

A sample from the demographic questions:

A sample from the multiple choice questions:

A sample from the matrix questions:

CODING AND ANALYSING

1. Probability Sampling

The 'probability sampling' data showed us;

Most of the participants are young and middle-aged.

Gender distribution of the participants shows that the percentage of male participants is 66%.

Most of the participants are undergraduate educated.

Most of the participants are students, followed by engineers and architects.

Education level

Ocupation

Majority of the participants use public transport services every day, the rest is mostly a few times in a week.

Majority of the participants use public transport services mornings and evenings. The reason for this assumption that they are students and daily workers.

The most preferred routes are on the European side of the city at 57%.

86% of the participants use TVM's. This result is important for the data safety of the machines.

Frequency of using TVM's is generally a few times a month. This is because the machines don't available to accept coins - users often load high-value banknotes.

Majority of the participants believe that TVM's are an easy way to top up their travel cards.

There is no indication that TVM's are useless.

Big amount of the participants did not care about the signage and didn't need any help for using the machine.

Usability comments

2. Stratified sampling

Within the 'Stratified sampling' method, we divided participators into the two main groups as Students and Engineers.

1. The most common results coming from Students are as follows;

Machines don't give back change.

They only accept banknotes, not coins.

They don't top up monthly travel cards.

2. The most common results coming from Engineers are as follows;

Their speed of performance is too slow.

They do not accept credit card payments. One of the participants comments that “I should be able to top up my IstanbulCard from my mobile phone over the Internet”.

They don't give back change

3. Non-probability Sampling

We especially preferred the purposive sampling method in this questionnaire, because some participants were working at Netas company as a software engineer, and their comments commonly contained some technical advice about the feature enhancement of the TVM's.

According to the data coming from Netas engineers;

Distribution of Netas engineers is 21%.

The most common comments indicate technical problems such as, speed of performance or absence of some features: 'paying with card '; 'giving back change'.

The results coming from the software engineers showed us that people were more susceptible in their professional field while answering the survey.

SYNTHESIS

According to the literature research, observation techniques, the result of the survey and meeting at the Belbim office, we concluded that our hypothesis was true in the general terms.

Most people were happy to use TVM's as they are making their life easier. Lack of some features such as 'pay with card', 'giving back change' or 'processing time' were the key insights from the study.

KEY INSIGHTS

Most people were happy to use TVM's because they thought they made their life easier.

The interface design of TVM was too colourful and some user flows were complicated. This made people find it exhausting.

'Pay with card' option was one of the most wanted features to be added

The outdoor design of TVM was too large. It takes up more space.

Voice guidance of TVM was helpful to learn how to use it. But this would make people uncomfortable if machines were positioned side by side.

TVM had a long processing time. It runs slower than users' expectation. This sometimes made them prefer other options to top up their travel card rather than waiting in the TVM queues