Subway Ticket Machine

On Wednesday, I went into the train station and saw one person behind each one of the three subway ticket machines, which are called ticket vending machines (TVM). I lined up behind the right one, where a man was using the machine to probably buy or refill a metrocard. I watched as he interacted with the screen attached to the TVM, as he selected “start,” then selected “English” as the language, and then chosen to “refill” his metrocard by “adding value.” But when he reached the pay stage, he ran into some trouble. This particular machine only accepted coins as a payment method. In fact, out of all three of the available machines, two of them only accepted coins and one accepted only cash. At this point, he left, but later came back to use the cash only TVM to refill his metrocard. These observations can be viewed within the context of this weeks readings – the Design of Everyday Things talks significantly about how good design is almost invisible, and should leave the user with a positive experience (or at least not a bad one). In this interaction, the machine’s buttons afford pushing, the small slot affords inserting coins, and the larger slots afford inserting and removing cards and bills. The huge slot at the bottom affords putting your hand in and taking things. The screen affords the ability to navigate through by touch. The signs that say “$1, $5” all the way up to “$50” are signifiers, and tells us that we are able to insert 1 dollar bills and 5 dollar bills but probably not $100 bills. The metrocard slot is indented inwards, which signifies to us that we should insert something in, rather than take something out. The buttons on the screen tell us specifically if we want to add time or value or use our credit or debit to pay. There are so many instances of affordances and signifiers on a subway ticket machine, and these are just a few. The reading also mentions feedback, more of which could improve the machine. Having feedback on the screen to tell us whether the bill we inserted was crumpled and why it was spit back out to us could be helpful.