Ticket machines: Why has QWERTY been abandoned?

DLyle44004 said:

The great majority of the British public have also learnt their ABCs (I'd hope).

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tell me the 10th, 11th and 12th letters in the alphabet without singing the alphabet song in your head. It's not as intuitive as it looks.

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On the subject of ticket machines.

The LNER journey planner ones are painfully slow, especially when your in a last minute panic to catch a train that leaves in 5 minutes but you are stuck tapping the down arrow and waiting 30 seconds each time when trying to book the 2318 service back.

I think it did have qwerty though

An interesting one...

QWERTY (English speaking world) became the default keyboard layout from the 1870s. Without going into the detailed history, the whole layout including staggered columns relates to the mechanical limitions of the early typewriters. The problem is because this layout has persisted through so many generations it is now engrained into everyone understanding. Even my great grandparents, who died in the 1940's were familiar with it (I have some typewriten business letters typed by them during the 1930s), and would not be phased by the alphanumeric part of a modern keyboard, even the Shift key to access upper case and symbols has been around for nearly as long.

So anyone trying to create a better (easier to use or learn) or more logical layout is not going to succeed because of this multigenerational history, there are numerous failed attempts. My grandmother showed me how to use a typewriter when I was 6 or 7, as she did most of the business letters, this was 60 years ago.

I suspect that ABC keyboards arose because with earlier generations of machines memory and processing ability was limited and its easier to draw a rectangular ABC screen using a simple software loop. So a bigger question, will the QWERTY keyboard ever be replaced in most applications.

Back to the thread, I think the majority of people would rather use a QWERTY layout, but for entering something like a booking code I can cope with ABC, however I can see one big disadvantage, those who have limited sight, enough to see the blobs of colour but not the detail, again these users are probably going to be familiar with QWERTY and would probably find any other layout more difficult, it would be intersting to hear from anyone on here who falls into that category

DLyle44004 said:

It makes sense on physical keyboards, but if you're a non-English speaking tourist who wants to visit Bodmin Parkway (I know keyboards use QWERTY regardless of language, but the English characters become irrelevant if you're typing in Arabic, Chinese, etc), it is easier to find 'BOD' from an alphabetical layout. It is far less confusing for those with a basic understanding of the English alphabet. ABC is also in use on machines outside of the UK - it is not just UK thing (although admittedly, the RDG's guidelines recommend both). It is a matter of preference rather than poor TVM design.

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The Chinese actually use a QWERTY keyboard which then converts it into the correct Chinese characters. You'd have a keyboard the size of the ticket hall otherwise as there's thousands of different characters.

I believe other languages have the QWERTY keys aswell, assuming for stuff using Latin.

DLyle44004 said:

Which not everyone uses (elderly, disabled, non-English speaking, etc). I am happy to defend QWERTY as the superior all-round typing layout, but for systems like this out in the open ABC works for a broader amount of users.

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Your assumptions fail, because you're equating that changing the type of physical interface means that all previous experience is valueless for all users. You're assuming that because a small number may people have difficulty with a QWERTY layout, that all users will have issues. It's this sort of logic that results in people adding ABC layouts to full keyboards in the first place, even though it's provably false.

As pointed out above, nobody knows where specific letters will be on a ABC layout keyboard, but the majority of users will know where they will be on a QWERTY layout, regardless if they are typing a whole sentence or a 3 character station code.

alxndr said:

Is there enough space on a TVM screen (especially the older types) to have a QWERTY keyboard without compromising button size? The calibration and responsivity of them means it can often be pretty hard to select the correct letter as it is.

If that's not the reasoning then I have no idea.

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Aren't there the same number of letters in both schemes?

DaleCooper said:

Aren't there the same number of letters in both schemes?

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Qwerty has a set 3 row(plus symbols/numbers) layout though, if you want say 4 row layout it may be less confusing to do ABC ,but if their is space for qwerty their's no reasonable reason not to use it

So how many of the people on this thread who are complaining about the loss of a QWERTY keyboard actually touch-type a document on a TVM on-screen keyboard?

renegademaster said:

tell me the 10th, 11th and 12th letters in the alphabet without singing the alphabet song in your head. It's not as intuitive as it looks.

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I'm not a touch-typist (they didn't teach typing skills to boys when I was at school), but I've been typing on QWERTY keyboards for nearly 50 years and I couldn't list out the order of the keys from memory (beyond the top-left six of course ).

ac6000cw said:

So how many of the people on this thread who are complaining about the loss of a QWERTY keyboard actually touch-type a document on a TVM on-screen keyboard?



I'm not a touch-typist (they didn't teach typing skills to boys when I was at school), but I've been typing on QWERTY keyboards for nearly 50 years and I couldn't list out the order of the keys from memory (beyond the top-left six of course ).

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you probably have intuitive feel for what region a particular key is at even if you couldn't name its exact order. Even If you don't, lots of people do , while nobody can touch type a random ABC grid

ac6000cw said:

I'm not a touch-typist (they didn't teach typing skills to boys when I was at school), but I've been typing on QWERTY keyboards for nearly 50 years and I couldn't list out the order of the keys from memory (beyond the top-left six of course ).

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I've been typing for a similar period, if you asked me where a key was i could give you a good idea, you could too probably, its in yer mind somewhere.

Bletchleyite said:

It's not unless you don't often use a computer or mobile device which are all QWERTY.

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I use both, and yet I have NO difficulty using a ABC format at car parking machines, of which all those I seem to use are in that format.

Is this another case of finding something inconsequential to knock the railways with?

infobleep said:

Until they allow one to buy e-tickets without a journey planner being involved, I will continue to use TMVs as they are the fastest way for me to buy walk up train tickets.

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I often buy e-Tickets on my phone during the few minutes walk from where I park my car to the station - that's even faster in overall time.

ac6000cw said:

I'm not a touch-typist (they didn't teach typing skills to boys when I was at school), but I've been typing on QWERTY keyboards for nearly 50 years and I couldn't list out the order of the keys from memory (beyond the top-left six of course ).

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This doesn't matter; your brain takes care of it automatically. There is no need to look at a keyboard or state the location of any letter, to be able to use a QWERTY keyboard highly effectively. However an ABC keyboard would require a lot of thought, slowing the process down.

Llanigraham said:

I use both, and yet I have NO difficulty using a ABC format at car parking machines, of which all those I seem to use are in that format.

Is this another case of finding something inconsequential to knock the railways with?

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Nope; it's a clear case of the relevant train company (and/or their supplier(s)) choosing not to adhere to the relevant standard, which slows ther process of purchasing tickets down (admittedly most people can avoid it, because most journeys are e-ticket enabled these days, but not all!)

Recessio said:

I think the far bigger with ticket machine keyboards (at least the ones used by Southern and SWR) is how crap the touchscreens are. You have to press so hard that you nearly break your fingers, I genuinely don't know how someone eg with arthritis would use it. And sometimes the touchscreen and the buttons are misaligned by as much as an inch, so good luck trying to type a destination no matter the keyboard layout

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Perhaps designed for the poster's mother who was brought up typing on three sheets of paper and carbon...

yorkie said:

This doesn't matter; your brain takes care of it automatically. There is no need to look at a keyboard or state the location of any letter, to be able to use a QWERTY keyboard highly effectively. However an ABC keyboard would require a lot of thought, slowing the process down.

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You can certainly do that with a tactile keyboard - I'm doing it now.

But that advantage disappears with a touch screen - you have to look for each key and also to check each one has registered (see above re unreliability of touchscreens). So I'm actually thinking ABC is probably better for a touchscreen interface, because as people have mentioned it works for different aspect ratios and for different nationalities of users.

edwin_m said:

Perhaps designed for the poster's mother who was brought up typing on three sheets of paper and carbon...

You can certainly do that with a tactile keyboard - I'm doing it now.

But that advantage disappears with a touch screen - you have to look for each key and also to check each one has registered (see above re unreliability of touchscreens). So I'm actually thinking ABC is probably better for a touchscreen interface, because as people have mentioned it works for different aspect ratios and for different nationalities of users.

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The design standards call for both; the default should be QWERTY and the miniority who aren't particularly familiar with QWERTY can choose ABC if they want!

DLyle44004 said:

Which not everyone uses (elderly, disabled, non-English speaking, etc). I am happy to defend QWERTY as the superior all-round typing layout, but for systems like this out in the open ABC works for a broader amount of users.

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Evidence for this? According to this site, 87% of U.K. adults have a smartphone (and I’d be willing to bet that if you include tablets it’s even higher). Every single one of them is used to typing letters on a touch screen using a QWERTY keyboard. That’s a huge majority for whom this is the natural system of input.

Given the circumstances under which the keypad is used - has anyone worked out what the maximum number of letters is that need to be entered before your destination will appear on the screen? Guessing all the North… and South…s are the likely candidates.

The exile said:

Given the circumstances under which the keypad is used - has anyone worked out what the maximum number of letters is that need to be entered before your destination will appear on the screen? Guessing all the North… and South…s are the likely candidates.

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Slightly cheating, but non-Travelcard tickets to LU/DLR destinations have got to be in with a shout since they changed from Zone U<whatever> to London Underground and DLR Zones <whatever>, meaning at least eight (virtual) keypresses.

dosxuk said:

Indeed. While 90%+ people will know an 'M' on a QWERTY layout is on the bottom row near the middle, above the spacebar, 0% know where to find it on the kiosk-of-the-day's layout.

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Approaching 100% will know that it's between 'L' and 'N' and about halfway between 'A' and 'Z'

renegademaster said:

you probably have intuitive feel for what region a particular key is at even if you couldn't name its exact order. Even If you don't, lots of people do , while nobody can touch type a random ABC grid

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You can certainly have a feel for roughly where on an ABC grid a letter is, simply by knowing the alphabet.

My Sky TV is also ABC which is very slow when trying to type in a full film or programme name. Someone, somewhere has it in for QWERTY!

Snex said:

The Chinese actually use a QWERTY keyboard which then converts it into the correct Chinese characters. You'd have a keyboard the size of the ticket hall otherwise as there's thousands of different characters.

I believe other languages have the QWERTY keys aswell, assuming for stuff using Latin.

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I forced myself to touch-type more than 50 years ago - basically by deciding to always use the "right" fingers rather than bashing away (albeit quick speedily) with just a few fingers. For a few days my typing was slower; then it was as fast as it had been before. And ever after it was quicker (the speed varying with intensity of usage of course, as well as depending on the quality of the keyboard). Not having a QWERTY keyboard as the default does seem bonkers. Like most people of most generations, almost irrespective of their typing speed, I find anything else horrendously slower. When in practice I can type on a good QWERTY almost at (not too speedy!) dictation speed - not 100% accurately, but good enough to be able to tidy it up afterwards.

Most Latin alphabet languages have similar layouts - though most have a tiny number of annoying differences (sometimes to cater for common accented characters, as well as in recognition of different letter frequencies I guess). I remember sitting in a field in Belgium, near the French border, one summer days years back, trying to bash out a speedy (bi-lingual) press release on a clunky old French manual typewriter [long story]; the fact it wasn't a "standard" QWERTY was slowing me down; but I found that by doing something like sitting at a certain angle to the keyboard, and hooking up a little finger at an angle, I could overcome most problems!

Interestingly, Russian keyboards - also not alphabetical - aren't laid out in an "equivalent" way to Latin alphabet ones (ie if you transliterated their keys into the "same" letter in our alphabet, it would have nothing in common with QWERTY); maybe someone knows the origin of the order used? I presume the same applies to the standard Cyrillic alphabet keyboards in countries using a similar Cyrillic alphabet to Russian.

Also interestingly, however [I think!], for Serbo-Croat (written in both Latin and Cyrillic, with the latter having a number of characters different from Russian Cyrillic), I've seen Cyrillic keyboards in roughly "Russian order", but I've also seen keyboards that cope with both orthographies (electronic ones, obviously) so that a given key can be used for either version of Serbo-Croat - and here, naturally, the keys need to match up; I think both follow a more or less QWERTY format (ie the Latin alphabet keyboard order taking precedence).

The problem with A B C D E F G H is you still need to remember what the first and last letters of each rows are, not just it starts with A and ends with Z.

If typewriters hadn't been invented before computers, the most ergonmic design would be:

A D G J M P S V Y
B E H K N Q T W Z
C F I L O R U X

That way you remember T is closer to the end than the start, so you've never going to start looking for T in the wrong area altogether.

ac6000cw said:

So how many of the people on this thread who are complaining about the loss of a QWERTY keyboard actually touch-type a document on a TVM on-screen keyboard?



I'm not a touch-typist (they didn't teach typing skills to boys when I was at school), but I've been typing on QWERTY keyboards for nearly 50 years and I couldn't list out the order of the keys from memory (beyond the top-left six of course ).

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I'm not a touch typist either but subconsciously I know where all the letters are on a QUERTY keyboard and I doubt it's going to change anytime soon. I wish I'd learnt to touch type whilst I was at school but boys weren't allowed to learn. What a great skill it would've been nowadays.

Nothing to do with railways but I've had to use a car park recently (another story, I hate paying to park my car) and the keypad was ABC and it threw me and it took twice as long to tap my vehicle reg number in.

I printed some collection tickets from a Northern TVM. That was QWERTY.

sprunt said:

Approaching 100% will know that it's between 'L' and 'N' and about halfway between 'A' and 'Z'

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And 0% will know whether it is on the left, right or in the middle of the screen so they can poke it with a finger - which is far more important than knowing the sequence it belongs to.

northwichcat said:

The problem with A B C D E F G H is you still need to remember what the first and last letters of each rows are, not just it starts with A and ends with Z.

If typewriters hadn't been invented before computers, the most ergonmic design would be:

A D G J M P S V Y
B E H K N Q T W Z
C F I L O R U X

That way you remember T is closer to the end than the start, so you've never going to start looking for T in the wrong area altogether.

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Alternating the hand you use to type by keeping common letter combinations apart helps speed up your typing, it's not just about keeping the hammers from clashing

renegademaster said:

Alternating the hand you use to type by keeping common letter combinations apart helps speed up your typing, it's not just about keeping the hammers from clashing

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The words we commonly use has changed since QWERTY was designed and keyboards are used a lot more for short replies. The designer of the typewriter wouldn't have considered autocomplete or messages being typed as live responses.

northwichcat said:

The words we commonly use has changed since QWERTY was designed and keyboards are used a lot more for short replies. The designer of the typewriter wouldn't have considered autocomplete or messages being typed as live responses.

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The most common words in the English language are "the" "of" "and" , simple grammatical words, I doubt that has changed much since typewriters

renegademaster said:

The most common words in the English language are "the" "of" "and" , simple grammatical words, I doubt that has changed much since typewriters

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In writing that sentence you must have pressed the shift button at least six times. You've also used the first letter of the alphabet and the second last letter. Whatever layout of keyword you had you could have easily used all your fingers.

If I want to book a train ticket from Northwich to Chester on the TPE website my sequence of presses would be

mouse click in browser address field.
tpe (enter)
mouse click in from station field
nwi (enter)
mouse click in to station field
ctr (enter)
then just mouse clicks until I get to the payment field. At which point I'd either need to login or enter my full name, address and card number.

(As www.tpexpress.co.uk is a site I've visited before it'll autocomplete when I type tpe)

DaleCooper said:

Sadly "of" has become more common because it has replaced "have".

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And 'the' is sometimes treated as optional when it shouldn't be.

I am becoming increasingly bemused by this thread. I start from the point that a typewriter is intended for, err, writing. (There's actually bit of a clue in the name if you look carefully.)

Writing is quite distinct from basic command input at the human-device interface. Every day many people will use a wide range of methods to interact with a phone keypad, cooker hob, microwave, electric shower, home entertainment system, games console, sat nav, fitness monitor, point of sale terminal, coffee machine, ATM, musical instrument, etc., etc.. These will use a variety of 'keys', buttons, knobs, swipes, menus, voice commands and so on. These generally get nowhere near the number of 'keystrokes' to write a report, assignment, story or whatever. Obviously it is sensible to use a device that is optimised for this purpose in terms of interface layout, ergonomics, screen 'feedback' and so forth. The QWERTY keyboard fits in here.

Although plenty of people do spend their days hacking away on keyboards I suspect that the majority don't by virtue of their occupation, lifestyle or age.

Strangely enough, not everybody finds typing 'easy' or a matter of practice or tuition. Even after decades of familiarity with manual and electric typewriters, TOPS terminals, computer keyboards, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. and having undertaken proper manual and electric typing courses at technical college I still have to look at every character as I type it, with a maximum of two fingers. And despite a lot of hands-on front line railway work that obviously didn't mean constant keyboard work, much of my life has been behind a desk.

When it comes to TVMs a few 'touches' seem neither here nor there in the overall scheme of things. At rural unstaffed stations the biggest challenges appear to come from rain-lashed screens, steamed-up glasses, sun glaring on the machine, trying to use one with wet sheepskin mittens, etc.. As a 'friend' of my local station these seem to be far more important issues as I try and assist despairing visitors.

DLyle44004 said:

(although admittedly, the RDG's guidelines recommend both). It is a matter of preference rather than poor TVM design.

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If they recommend both, why do the machines not have both? That would stastify many more people.

ac6000cw said:

I often buy e-Tickets on my phone during the few minutes walk from where I park my car to the station - that's even faster in overall time.

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I don't have a car, so wouldn't be walking from a car park to the station.