py_megapixel
Established Member
These [referring to some Chiltern machines described in another thread] look to be the same god-awful Parkeon/Flowbird ticket machines that Northern have (I think it's an Arriva-wide thing). They seem to be designed to look as fancy and futuristic as possible, while being needlessly slow to use by forcing everyone to go through a journey planner even if they know exactly what they want, and generally having an unintuitive and poorly laid-out user interface. Classic example of form over function.
The procedure for getting a ticket out of them is:
- skip past a list of commonly chosen stations
- skip past another list of commonly chosen stations
- type destination (whether it accepts CRS codes or not seems to be hit-and-miss)
- choose date
- select departure time (even if you want an open ticket??)
- click "continue"
- select ticket type/number of passengers/railcards etc.
- read a redundant confirmation screen
- pay; cross your fingers that your perfectly valid debit card isn't declined because the machine doesn't feel like it today.
and throughout this whole time, the touchscreen is really unresponsive and annoying to use.
To put that into perspective, at a few stations these pieces of cr*p are installed next to Virgin Trains/Avanti machines, where the procedure is literally as simple as
- type destination
- select ticket type and number of passengers (as well as railcards and things if you want)
- pay
If I was in a hurry, and know what I want, I can get a ticket out of one of those in less than a minute. Which means that even if the Virgin machine has a substantial queue, it can be quicker to wait that use the Northern one. Not that Northern deserve the commission for selling me the ticket anyway.
The procedure for getting a ticket out of them is:
- skip past a list of commonly chosen stations
- skip past another list of commonly chosen stations
- type destination (whether it accepts CRS codes or not seems to be hit-and-miss)
- choose date
- select departure time (even if you want an open ticket??)
- click "continue"
- select ticket type/number of passengers/railcards etc.
- read a redundant confirmation screen
- pay; cross your fingers that your perfectly valid debit card isn't declined because the machine doesn't feel like it today.
and throughout this whole time, the touchscreen is really unresponsive and annoying to use.
To put that into perspective, at a few stations these pieces of cr*p are installed next to Virgin Trains/Avanti machines, where the procedure is literally as simple as
- type destination
- select ticket type and number of passengers (as well as railcards and things if you want)
- pay
If I was in a hurry, and know what I want, I can get a ticket out of one of those in less than a minute. Which means that even if the Virgin machine has a substantial queue, it can be quicker to wait that use the Northern one. Not that Northern deserve the commission for selling me the ticket anyway.
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