New System: New Quality?

This week I was on business trip to Warsaw, where I always go by train. I go there quite often and always wonder why the heck they changed ticket selling system. My friend bets it was forced by trade unions to ensure growth of cashiers’ employment. From a customer perspective only two changes are:

• New ticket blank, which I don’t really care about.

• Longer queues to buy a ticket.

What are the main differences between the old and the new system than?

• Nice graphic interface. In the old version there were text interface driven by keyboard. Now it was replaced with very nice graphic UI, which is driven by pencils. That’s not a joke – expensive touchscreens were delivered with system and cashiers soon switched from taping it with fingers to using pencils with rubber on the end. It’s definitely much slower than keyboard. What more, cashiers has to type in some data (e.g. station names), so they keep switching between keyboard and touchscreen.

• Synchronous printing. The system used to print tickets asynchronously, so after sending to a printer first one it was ready to set up another. In Poland in express and intercity trains we need two pieces of paper: a ticket for train and a seat reservation, so the situation where more than a single ticket is printed is quite often. Btw: why the heck they can’t print it on a single ticket? Coming back to the new system – now it prints synchronously, so the cashier waits for the first sheet to be printed and than starts setting up another.

• Screen design. In the old system main screen looked very similar to a ticket. Now it’s been rearranged what confuses cashiers. I saw a situation when cashier’s made a mistake in choosing a destination station. Error returned by database was displayed on the screen. Hmm... No exception handling? Interesting. Cashier didn’t know what to do because she neither understood a message nor noticed wrong station on the screen. It’s not as intuitive as it used to be. It’s not as intuitive as it should be.

Now sum up all those seconds added to a process of ticket selling and multiply a result by number of passengers. You’ll end up with great number and conclusion that implementing new system wasn’t a brainwave. Above issues are being reduced over the time, but they won’t be fully eliminated. Printing tickets won’t be as fast as it used to be.

Decision-makers from Polish National Railways made a major mistake – they forgot what is it all for? It’s not for having nice graphic user interface and fancy touchscreens in booking offices. It’s for passengers who want to buy a ticket. And believe me; they want to do it fast.

Instead of spending the money on that implementation Polish National Railways should rather build some kiosks on platforms. Touchscreens (yes, in this scenario it does make sense) when a passenger can easily choose:
- next train from this platform
- second class
- for non-smokers
- here’s my credit card
- thank you
Wouldn’t it be faster for passengers? Wouldn’t money be spent better?

Don’t follow example of Polish National Railways. When you want to implement any system ask three questions:

• What are main goals I want to achieve in this particular area? E.g. ticket selling and doing it fast.

• How they will be handled with the new system? E.g. with new graphic user interface on touchscreens.

• How the new system will be better than the old one? E.g. it won’t.

I know I oversimplify here, but if they’d made some deeper analysis based on those three questions they wouldn’t have implemented that crappy software. At least not that particular one.