While I’m on a tech rant – who invented this piece of pure sadism?
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IIRC, this one is called N² and runs a headless Android on a limited hardware, which explains the slowness of this thing.
The next version (called streetsmart) on which I worked 2 years ago is a real mess. It is based on Android 5.1 (Android 8 or 9 was available when the project started), and features a touch screen. There is absolutely no isolation between ticketing apps and maintenance apps (which allow among other things to withdraw the cash). A custom launcher gives access to one set of apps or another, depending on the current mode. An hardware token and a gesture allow agents to switch from vending mode to maintenance mode, but if one gains access to a shell, one just has to send particular intents to access to maintenance apps.
Some anecdotes:
- We shipped debug Android builds for internal testing (with root, adb enabled, etc) which somehow got sent to the customer, deployed on a public network and got infected by crypto miners. That triggered overheat of the CPU and reboots of the devices.
- Those are supposed to be deployed in Barcelona, I don't know if it's actually in production right now.
- Those were supposed to be deployed in NYC, but the deal got cancelled (not really a surprise to me).
- They run on a 12v car battery and a solar cell. I had a partial machine to dev (with no solar part), and I had to buy a car battery charger to power the battery.
The work itself was rather interesting (have you ever worked on a Android device that has a built-in printer and a cash machine?), but project management, collaboration between teams and vision were terrible. The main board seemed really well designed also.
Does it? Must be very limited hardware, then. I haven’t even ever seen one of those, but I would think a parking meter UI wouldn’t be particularly taxing on hardware.
It is just as ugly as you describe.
The rest of the whole parking enforcement/payment industry is probably full of really old incumbents like those two and an absolute shit show.
- There was way too much bureaucracy.
- Software, security, design choices were decided by some kind of committee that didn't have sufficient expertise.
- Competition between teams.
- They wanted to do scrum, without knowing how to do it.
I think their actual expertise was focused on hardware design and manufacture (they build and assemble most of their hardware components in their own factory), and probably firmware devevelopment.
While I finally walked back to car to tell the family in shame that I was, indeed, not able to use a ticket machine successfully, it suddenly hit me: the machine expects the license plate number!
(In my language, license plates are called number plates.)
But honestly, after reading the post I thought I would just glance at the picture and see clear indications for "change language" instructions, the same way a proofreader takes moments to find what the writer will just not see until pointed. Instead, it did take me an unexpected amount of time, and I still feel that option as well concealed.
It has two separate asynchronous screens, two sets of printed instructions (plus t&cs), more instructions on both screens, then two keypads (but with the same symbols although they're not interoperable). There is no consistent self-explanatory language for talking about the various buttons, knobs, slots and problems, and how the user's attention should flow between them. If use of this machine wasn't mandated, nobody would ever, ever touch it.
It’s a total shitshow without even starting on the tech. Why is there an on-off button? Why is there a double flag button? Why is there a rotating button? Why is the wheelchair button not mentioned anywhere in the instructions?
Quite often the card reader isn't working and it takes about 90s to timeout; always relaxing when there's a queue forming.
Meanwhile: ad companies presumably hoover up registration marketing data and sell it on.
What also drives me nuts is the "soft" element that has been removed. In the old days you bought a space and then had that nice interaction with other people if you left early when you could give them your ticket.
Not only is this new approach profit maximisation at the expense of ease of use, it's also profit maximisation at the expense of social contact.
Legally, I'd be interested to know if anyone's done the work on what renting a space looks like. I mean, I've paid for that space for one hour so if I leave after half an hour, don't I have a say over giving my ticket to a random...?
Under which legal agreement? "If you park, then you agree"? _Parking_ as a sufficient condition?
Now let us review why a "society" should make sense, and if some agents become a collective affront to natural rights the action should be collective.
In this case (and more), the apparent agent is the municipality - which shows the perversion of these days.
As someone pointed out, the engineering required to harden those (against thieves, vandals, weather) is impressive. Thus, the amount of money your cities, universities, airports, etc. pay up front for paystations and then annually in mandatory maintenance contracts (that's where the real money is made) ... ugh.
I'm not saying our UI & UX over the years are without flaws (IVR, WML, SMS, & finally apps) but at least you're not standing in the weather or leaving your appointments to feed the beast.
† Added: Actually, the best payment interaction might be no interaction but the whole always-connected-and-location-aware-car wasn't on our roadmap in 2000. The scene is ripe for change again IMO.
My rant over software in general is that we have rushed to get features into things without investing the correct amount of time handling errors and making UX as slick as possible.
It seems that is now being replaced by the app being optional - if you don’t do anything and just park and leave, you get a bill in the mail for the time your car was parked, based on license plate recognition. No signups, no parking tickets, just park and leave.
I like this. It's civilized. As I said, the best interaction today could be no interaction.
One way or another, convenience means you're probably trusting someone with information and linking it to an account or address or payment mechanism. For city governments, maybe this is okay. For commercial destinations and sketchy parking operators ... maybe not.
The objective no longer becomes to be a tool to help the user pay for parking but to generate "engagement" in order to justify employees' salaries (and potential VC funding) and monopolize the parking payment market.
I just checked your website and indeed it's asking me to agree to ToS, privacy & cookie policy - I'd rather fight with the old-school machine. According to the privacy policy you're also selling aggregated analytics data - that's a huge downgrade from "insert coin to pay for parking".
The old-school approach, with all its flaws, just takes payment and no other identifying information and leaves no opportunities for marketing/product to mark their territory.
All of these are textbook examples of how markets actually add friction.
You could have a single centralised ATM/payment network with a national or even global transaction standard for different application UIs, hardware, and software.
But instead everyone duplicates effort to build their own version, some of the versions have exploitative features, and the job is done poorly - although no doubt it's profitable for the shareholders.
Thank goodness I've never seen this. Where are you that this is a thing?
- changing the random ad to a recommendation based on your credit card and parking history (and car age and type, derived from camera, or from the license plate)
- a quiz question to check that you watched the ad
- a subscription with your credit card company to get checkouts without ads
Progress! /s
So it's an app where you use the same account to log in that you can use for public transport, and the geolocation so far has always matched me up with the correct parking spot and I can just start (by-minute pricing) and stop again, it reminds me if I forgot to check out and it gets paid from my billing info that is in that account, same as when I take the subway.
Now if we're talking about private parking lots, that's where I am probably ok to keep on using cash or card, and nothing with an account.
I think that using Apps can be very reasonable and easier to use in many situations, but I also think that accessibility standards ought to be different when you're a government. If cash and coins are legal tender, then they should be acceptable as payment in some fashion.
It’s a nice app! Many parking apps are pretty utilitarian in nature but found PayByPhone very easy to use—it feels very well designed to me.
That said, I did end up with a ticket because I parked in their space, phone was dead, and machine was broken. I charged my phone as soon as possible to pay, but it was too late.
There's only so much one can do to defend a 1mm slot that has to accept a plastic card (ditto for coin slots).
I'm guessing at their reasoning, but "everyone knows QWERTY" is probably not as true as you think, or if it is, it hasn't been so for that long.
It could also be an international company that doesn't want to have SKUs for the keypad for every region (eg France uses AZERTY).
But you also can't name a layout which is more familiar than QWERTY, and its regional variants (including AZERTY).
If you don't want to localize, US QWERTY would probably be the single most familiar layout globally.
It's not like these are machines from the 90s when not that many people had computers. The addition of the keyboard is specifically something that was done because wireless internet and computer vision improved enough to do away wit the older version.
I'd be earnestly curious what percentage of the population that lives in an area with controlled parking like this doesn't interact with a keyboard at least weekly. Even my 99 year old grandfather was sending emails from his computer a decade ago from his farm in the rural US. The target demographic here is A. People who own cars B. who need to park them in urban areas with street parking. Both of those are, for the last decade, likely to own a smartphone, I'd imagine.
Relying upon a machine that is so complex and frustrating to use far outweighs the tiny loss of revenue for when people pass on unused parking time to someone else.
Somehow I thought the opposite, I was sure that my layout (Hungarian[1]) is about the same as every other, most probably a direct copy of the German, but nah.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hungarian+keyboard+layout&iar=imag...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Olivetti...
His explanation was that they did not use AZERTY or QWERTY because it wouldn't work for foreigners.
I suspect the license plates are stored and sold (in hashed form if we're at all lucky) so some adtech company can use it as another datapoint in their quest for eyeballs.
I work at the railroads, some traveler needed a ticket but couldn't figure out the machine. I couldn't figure it out either as I never use it. I gather other railroad employees and no one could make sense of it. We eventually just wrote them a paper ticket (intended for when the machines are broken)
It must have been a week later when it struck me the thing must have been out of ticket paper and just hid all the functionality. The remaining functions were for putting a trip on a kind of credit card that more frequent travelers use but as such card was not inserted the menus were "limited" to a forest of various kinds of discount cards and alternative means of travel like adding a metro or bus trip.
The separate display and numeric keyboard unit is obviously part of the card reader that you only need to interact with if you want to pay with a card. Its presence as an entirely isolated unit within the machine is mandated by payment processors. It is a separately certified secure enclave that shields the card payment authorization process from the rest of the system so your information, most importantly your PIN, can't leak.
The text on the machine is actually well structured: T&C glued on at the very top. The usage instructions are in the wide top window. The smaller window to the side details the parking fees.
There's absolutely a way to get (non-sensitive) display output out of it so they can reuse the main screen for display at least (fast food self-checkout machines do this in my area - the status display from the card terminal is replicated on the main screen during the payment process).
The current parking situation is an obvious microcosm of the rent-seeking-complex/delirium that's, imho, one of the biggest issues we as a society face.
As a social experiment they should try to maximize frustration by randomizing the keyboard layout and implementing ELIZA as the user interface.
> Hello, I am Eliza.
* I'd like to pay for parking
> Don't you ever say Hello?
* I just want to pay for parking
> Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.* used violence against the one he used when he saw at the end of the process the message "communicating with server...", thinking "You are centrally logging the presence of my car here at this time? Who gave you permission?"
* and before that, during the operation, he had to note that the keys were capacitive: because in the middle of the pandemic, he was using thick paper cloth and other buffer to operate the keyboard, and it just would not work. And of course, those monsters, apparently planned to require "contact" for operation (everybody touching the same surface), were installed in the middle of the pandemic.
He resolved, as it may be expected, never again to park near the center of his hometown.
The verification SMS simply never comes though. I've tried calling them, and the customer service can't help, my phone provider can't help, and I've tried using other SIMs, changed my phone and it still doesn't work.
I just rely on my girlfriend's phone where it does work. It's an interesting case of the government forcing a dependency on private companies with no recourse if things don't go as planned.
The screen is barely readable too.
I'm sure the software is equally terrible and slow as hell.
A few months/years down the line, even the sub-par talent working on it will probably realize how terrible their product is, but speaking up would be akin to admitting defeat (and might have career risks), so nobody says anything and congratulates themselves for having "delivered" the project.
When the end client receives the deliverable the same situation applies, it's too late to backpedal even though the product is shit, so they also keep quiet and pretend like it is fine.
Also at the time the system was designed (possibly pre-smartphones), I remember lots of machines like it, incurring train ticket machines with touchscreen keyboards, had alphabetical keyboards. I suspect there was a recommendation that not everyone, such as very old people, would be familiar with QWERTY. I also suspect that in the intervening decade or so, it was realised that actually no-one can use a 2D alphabetical layout at all, because the alphabet is linear and presenting it a grid didn't work. So actually alphabetical is pretty bad for everyone. But it's also the lowest common denominator.
Sadly, once you've shipped a device like this, no one will pay you to go around and replace very expensive ruggedised keyboards just to make typing easier.
Plus the service fee for getting a service technician out to the machine (I imagine at least £100 a visit), plus the admin overhead of detecting failures and scheduling visits and lost downtime income would make that an extremely hard sell to a council. Hundreds of pounds per machine per year.
And then multiply by every other element that you skimp on, and the thing will be broken continuously after the first 6 months, while sapping thousands in parts and labour.
OLED isn't the only screen technology and it's not what would look best in this environment. The best would be eink which has higher contrast in the sun. Eink can also be put behind weather proofing and be fine. It also doesn't draw power at idle.
I wish I could work on fixing all of the IoT gear that governments install.
The screen indeed looks like it'd be tricky and annoying to read.
Even in places that only have numeric plates I assume they are not going to make a numbers-only version of the machine
Saw one recent that did license plate.
Also, if you use the app, you don't need to use the machine although for some reason, we seem to have at least 10 different parking apps in the UK. Not sure who decides that we need another parking app.
So maybe Peugeot?
I think it could be way better if it was slightly reorganized so the instructions were clear and positioned near the point of interaction they were describing (“1. Enter plate number (or whatever) here. 2. Enter payment here. 3. Take ticket and place on dash.”)
I don’t claim to be the best at it but I design UIs pretty frequently and one thing I’ve learned is that nobody reads anything if it’s more than one or two words; they just start pressing buttons by intuition and proceed by trial and error, and there are a lot of buttons to get lost in here.