Support Your Innovation

Today I went to an usual business trip from my home Krakow to Warsaw. I chose train, as always, but because quite many people from my city work in Warsaw during all weekdays trains which are heading to the capital on Monday morning are full. And when I say full I mean you probably won’t get a seat unless you’ve bought a ticket earlier. That’s why I decided to use (for the first time) internet booking service, where you can comfortably buy a ticket on Sunday evening without moving from your desk.

The service is few months old so I guessed it should work at least fairly. And to be honest it’s OK. It’s crappy, but it does the job. Why it is crappy?

• Internet service saves their money, right? They don’t need to employ another cashier; queues are shorter and so on. I guess they should promote it with a big, shining and blinking banner on the main site, right? Nope. They hid it, so no one looking for connection can get know that there actually is something like that. I’d add even a button on the list of connections saying “Buy my now, please, please.” Of course near those which the service is available for – it’s not available for all connections.

• Creating an account is another thing. Login name must be longer than 6 characters. That’s perfectly OK. But why it can’t be longer than 12 characters?

• Choosing a password. Why the heck I can’t use the dot in my password? Of course the dot isn’t the only exception. You can use letters and numbers only. I can hardly recall any of my standard passwords which fits the mask.

• Station names are different than in connection seeker. Instead of “Warsaw Central” there’s “Warsaw Cen.” Why? Just to make user’s life harder?

These “features” makes the service itself less polished and using it a bit annoying, but it’s still more polished and less annoying than dealing with most of cashiers on the station. What more, service defends itself with giving ease of use with its main functionality – buying a ticket, unless…

Unless your printer is broken or you don’t have any. One of essential steps in the process of buying a ticket is printing a confirmation. I hadn’t done that (printer run out of ink) so I learnt how important it is. Without this piece of paper your ticket is not valid and you have to buy another in the train. It doesn’t matter that a controller has a list of all internet reservations. It doesn’t matter he has all important data, including the name and the id number, which allows him to unambiguously identify you as a legal ticket owner. It doesn’t matter he can check that you it’s you (with the id). It doesn’t even matter if you show the darn confirmation on your laptop. Paper is the king. Now, bow in front of The Great Paper.

I don’t get it. I know that Polish National Railways isn’t a company you expect to be innovative. But sometimes someone tries to make travelers’ life a bit easier. Like with the service allowing to buy tickets via internet. And then, somebody else screws it all with completely dumb rule expecting you to have a useless piece of paper. They don’t even take it from you – just a glimpse on the sheet and you got it handed back.

When innovation is intended to work, there should be whole environment created to support the it. Sure you’ll find some exceptions within the best world-changing ideas, which probably can make their own way to the people. Unfortunately, with the whole rest you need to carefully grow your innovations, unless you don’t care if they’ll be a success or not.

Tagged as: innovation, software business, software design, usability issues, user interface, website design