Once again, we see two different styles of TVM and two different interfaces. Great for the technophobe that just about manages to use one and then encounters another and goes back to square one... all while there's a queue building behind which I bet would actually play a part in someone buying the wrong thing by not taking the time to check (if a machine could even provide more useful information than loads of shortened words to fit an arbitrary limit).
It isn't just foreign visitors, or the people who don't use computers, as my mum who is pretty tech savvy has made two mistakes over the years;
1) Bought a first class ticket by mistake, having misread 'First' when travelling on First Capital Connect. An RPI brought this to her attention when checking, and wondering why she hadn't sat in first class.
2) Bought a ticket from Cheshunt to London Terminals to get to Euston, assuming the plural meant ANY London terminal station.
I'm sure people make mistakes every day, but many might simply buy a ticket that cost more than they needed to and don't get into any trouble - yet that doesn't make it any more acceptable.
Seeing a TVM with some 30-odd options is pathetic. While I'd like to see a TVM selling every ticket you can get from a window (or online) including buying ahead, or starting from another station (but marking clearly what station the ticket was sold at and when, for people who might try and defraud by dumbbelling) but present the information in a user friendly format.
If I was designed a TVM from scratch today, I'd be seeking input from designers of UIs - whether that be from Google, Apple or whoever. I'd then consider having the first option being to buy a ticket via a wizard, or an 'advanced' option for regulars that know what they want. I'd even suggest having shortcut codes that regulars can input to get to the exact same ticket again (and printing that code on the ticket somewhere).
Then the TVM would begin by asking the simple questions to drill down the list of choices to only those relevant, such as the day you're travelling, coming back (if you're coming back), any railcard you own and specific operators (or fully flexible).
I don't know the best order to that (and that would be best decided via testing different options with focus groups, existing rail users etc) but I'd then suggest having a screen that contains most of the chosen information on the one display - with options to edit individual options without clicking back and no doubt losing everything. If you want to change your railcard or return date, must you go back and re-enter your destination, for example?
If you then had your ticketing app on your phone, you'd now have the option of pre-selecting your ticket in advance of getting to the machine and then entering the code to get that very ticket. Clever, huh? Going forward, you'd ditch the code and touch your NFC phone against the machine... possibly then paying on the machine and transferring a ticket back to your smartcard.
The current software looks like it is designed by committee (just as Motorola phone software used to be - remember the software on their phones before Android?), ticking all the boxes on what it had to do (maybe with a few things inserted here and there during upgrades) but never once caring about the user experience as it wasn't part of the remit.