Disclaimer: This is my first time writing so I only focused on a small part of the whole process. Any comments and/or inputs are highly appreciated. Also, I’ll do my best to replace the photos with more decent ones in the future.

Commuting can be an arduous task especially during rush hours, not to mention the long lines whenever you’re buying or reloading a card for your train ride. As a person who commutes by train semi-daily, I experience these types of pet peeves during my commutes to work and it can be annoying sometimes. Annoyed at what or who, you might ask? At the commuters? Maybe we can take a look at the design of interface in the machines first.

I decided to make a short case study on purchasing tickets and reloading cards before riding the train. I’ll only be focusing on what we can do to further improve the interface within the machines and not the whole train commuting experience so that the scope won’t be to big for me to handle.

Before moving on, I’d like to mention that I’m not in any way affiliated with the Light Rail Transit Authority nor do I claim that the approaches shown here would work or not(unless tested) but the thought of getting test results gets me excited. Anyway, let’s begin shall we?

What’s the problem?

If you look at things right now, buying and reloading cards seem pretty straightforward so there isn’t really a problem with how we buy our tickets so I focused more on efficiency.

Things to consider

There are some questions that I asked myself while doing this case study; mainly:

Why do people get stuck when buying a ticket or reloading a card?

What can we revise/omit to further improve the flow and interaction between commuters and the kiosk?

I would like to broaden the scope of the case study to all of the transit lines here in Manila but I chose to stick with the LRT Line 2. Also, I’m limited to my experience with commuting to work because, as I’ve mentioned, I’m not affiliated with the LRTA so there’re no data for me to use coming from them.

The options

There a couple courses of action that you can make when you’re faced with a kiosk in the LRT. These are:

Purchasing a Single Journey Ticket

Purchasing a Stored Value Card*

Reloading Stored Value Cards

*Note: for now, I’ll exclude the part where I purchase a Stored Value Card since I have a Stored Value Card of my own. I’ll add in the info next time.

A claim and some approaches

Looking at the user interface in the kiosk, there are things that can be improved to let commuters spend less time “talking” to a machine and go straight to the train. Some of the things that I focused on are as follows: information architecture, layout, and copy.

If you’re a person who has a background in design and has experienced buying a ticket from the kiosks in the LRT, apart from the layout, you’ll immediately notice how “cold” the copy and how all-over-the-place the hierarchy is. I bet we can do better than that. So with that said, I have set some tasks for me to work on during this case study:

Restructure the information architecture

Redesign the layout in the user interface

Rewrite the existing copy to a more welcoming tone

Remove unnecessary steps (if applicable)

Pre-journey rituals

FIGURE 1.1 — Initial screen shown in the machines

Purchasing a ticket and/or reloading a card seem and should be very straightforward. As shown in the photo above, you can either purchase a Single Journey Ticket or reload an existing Stored Value Card and the UI is transparent with what the machine’s able to cater. But for good measure, let’s redesign the page just to make the flow consistent with the rest of the mockups I’ll be showing.

FIGURE 1.2 — Welcome Screen Mockup

One of the tasks is to change the copy from a cold to a warmer tone so I’ve added a header to make the interaction more engaging. I’ve also changed the copy in the language options since “Select Tagalog” doesn’t sound right to me at all.

I’m in the midst of learning how to write better copy so “Welcome to the LRT” is the best line I can come up with for now. I hope you guys can get my point with this. If you have anything better in mind, let’s chat about it in the comments section.

Now that we know what transactions we can do, let’s get to reloading a card first.