Where am I?

So you're on an underground/metro/subway/other urban rail transport system.  You know where you got on (probably) and you know where you need to get off or change (hopefully).  But do you know where you are whilst en-route?  Probably not.

Hong Kong's MTR has a lot going for it.  It's efficient, the ticketing system (Octopus cards) is incredible (more on that another time perhaps), and it gets you to places in Hong Kong faster than you might otherwise be able to get there.  What I found particularly fantastic though was the in-carriage maps.

So often, especially in cities I'm not familiar with, I have absolutely no idea where I am when travelling on public transport.  And this is not because of a lack of cognitive mapping skills.  Like on many other train systems, Hong Kong's MTR provides a route map within the carriage.  This route map goes one step further though.  It is not a static, sticker on the wall.  It has lights to indicate which stops you have passed, and which stop is coming up next.  It goes one step further still.  It lets you know whether you need to get out on the left side or the right side.  Genius.

No more standing in the middle of a crowd of people, deciding on your exit strategy, wandering which people you will have to elbow out the way to get off the train.  You can gently start making your way towards the correct door in plenty of time.  And no more having to enquire, sometimes in a foreign language, "Which stop is next?".  The map highlights it for you.

Compare to buy

I’m off on a camping trip to France over the summer with my boyfriend.  We will be going to places we’ve never been before.  We don’t have a sat nav.  Time to buy one I feel.

I was aware of a couple of brands, but thought that there were probably more.  I did a quick search, and right enough there were others.  I quickly discounted ones where I wasn’t clear if Europe was covered.  This left me with the original two brands – TomTom and Garmin.

My next port of call was their respective websites.

Neither are amazing, but Garmin definitely came out on top.  For a start they enabled me to filter their products – I only wanted to see sat navs which included Europe.  Straight away that was 17 less products for me to look at.  TomTom on the other hand don’t enable any sort of filtering, so you are left to do this on your own by looking at the product name and description.

Secondly, the Garmin website enabled comparison of products.  This is a godsend when the products are in fact so similar.  There was no easy way of doing this on TomTom.  A Google search for ‘compare tom tom sat nav’ took me to a comparison page, allegedly on their site, but you could only compare the products they had chosen.  And there wasn’t a great deal of information to compare on.

Thirdly, the compare feature on the Garmin website enabled me to find out what the different products offered.  There was no easy way of doing this on the the TomTom website.  Their website would probably win on the ‘looking good’ awards, but it just doesn’t deliver.  There are videos, but they took forever to load.  And there just isn’t the same level of technical (presented in a non technical way) information.

I think I’m going to buy a Garmin.  It was just easier to find information about them.  I feel more confident that I know what I’m going to get.

Just tell me how much it costs to park my car

I'm off to the o2 Arena on Saturday night to watch a gig.  It's a pretty awkward place to get to if you live Westwards outside of London.  Taking the train will probably take considerably longer than driving, what with all the changes and waiting around.  But what about parking?

My first port of call was the o2 Arena website.  Obvious place to start I would have thought.  They have a label: ''Getting to the o2".  Perfect.  I arrive on a page, and the second item on the list is "Parking".  Brilliant.  Then things start to go a little pear shaped.  The next page I arrive on has information about how to get there by car.  I don't want that.  I want information about parking.

And more specifically I want information about how much parking costs.  I scroll down the page and I see a nice big button "Pre-book Parking".  Great.  But I still haven't seen how much it costs.

On the resulting page I have to fill in a large form.  I don't want to fill in a form without knowing how much it's going to cost me.  At the bottom, I notice the call-to-action is "Check prices and pay".  Am I paying now?  But I don't know how much it is.  I realise I haven't filled in any payment details.  I relax slightly and click.  My page is then riddled with error messages because I still don't want to fill the form in!

I am far more likely to fill the form in and make my booking if I have all the information I need up front.

Parking tickets

How many times have you arrived at your airport car park in a rush?  Parked up in the first space you find, then run to get the bus you see coming towards the closest bus stop?  And completely forgotten to make a note of where you parked your car.

Then you come back to the car park days/weeks later and you can’t find your car.

It hasn’t happened to me *smiles smugly*.  But just yesterday I was on the bus back to the car park, and a couple on the bus could not for the life of them remember where they had parked their car.

If only they’d kept a note of where they’d parked their car!  But who is organised to have somewhere to write this information down when they’re catching a flight?

Enter the latest in parking tickets – on the reverse there is a space to write your parking area and row number down.  All you need to do now is make sure you have a pen to hand!  User experience is all around us.