Examples of Bad Design: TfL ticket machines

There is hopefully a special part of hell reserved for those that inflict stupidly bad design decisions upon us. Take, for example, the decision by the makers of the machines that allow one to top up their oyster card to require the process to be terminated by the user presenting their card to the machine one final time. This doesn’t sound particularly onerous, but clearly some users had difficultly understanding the request so the screen features a very large red arrow pointing down towards the card reading widget which is to the right of the screen. What a pity the “Cancel” button, of the same colour as the arrow, is to be found in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, just a few millimetres from the tip of the arrow…

On the subject of TfL ticket machines, the exorbitant new cash fare structure means the ticket machines that only accept coins are now practically unused: few people carry sufficient coins for even the £3 single fare. Correspondingly, the small number of more useful tickets machines that accept cards and notes and allow one to charge an oyster card always seem to have very large queues….