Blog Post: Interactive Technology
A piece of interactive technology in public that is used by multiple people is the subway card swiping machine. I noticed that it is an everyday technology that is used by millions. However, there are still many first-timers who struggle to figure out how to place their card, swipe and get past the machine. Many people are in a rush and sometimes do have to swipe multiple times to get the swiping right, and many of them run into people coming in from the opposite direction and so they have to wait until they swipe their card.
I decided to stand on the Jay Street Metrotech subway station around 5 p.m. when the rush hour is at a peak. I observed people interestingly swiping the wrong side of the card, or sometimes even swiping and not realizing they don’t have enough credit to get past. Another fun aspect was some people had the card ready in their hands by the time they got to the machine, while others reached the swiping machine, and then removed the card from their wallets. Many of them waited to even check how much balance they had left in their card, while a few walked past without looking at the screen.
In Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, he says ” the human mind is exquisitely tailored to make sense of the world. Give it the slightest clue and off it goes, providing an explanation, rationalization, and understanding”. This made me think about how the swiping machine could lack some clue about swiping the card the right way in the right direction especially for people who are in a hurry. Sometimes a very subtle clue may not be enough to be rationalized in a few seconds and maybe the design could be such that could help the passenger identify the right way to swipe the card. One design that I thought could work for this machine could be Crawford’s reflection on Physical Computing’s Biggest Hits and Misses. The multitouch interface could be a great way of having people just tap their subway card on the machine without having to figure the right way to swipe them. This could save them time and the chaos to configure the way the machine could take the card.
