For Transit Companies

You’ve invested in the tracks and the trains, your stations, signals and telecommunications, ticket issuing and revenue protection. Your safety case is signed, sealed and delivered and yet…

Passenger information and wayfinding is one of the areas I have so often seen neglected in my 25+ years of professional research, and travel. And even in cases where a great deal of time and money looks to have been spent, the results don’t pass the ‘Sanity Test’.

Why not make the very most from your capital investment in the physical infrastructure – the ‘hardware’ – by being smart in the ‘software’?

Confusing information will dissuade existing customers from making more journeys at best and absolutely put new customers off at worst.

The good news is that through those many years of experience, I have a highly developed ‘Sanity Test’ kit. It looks at several vitally important areas of your information provision:

  • mapping – schematic, diagrams, charts, locality, overview, to name just a few.
  • timetabling – does it pass legibility and cognition tests, for example?
  • wayfinding – signs, vehicles, stops, stations, interchanges, modal transfers and so forth, best use of graphics. is there consistency throughout?
    • Direction, Orientation, Identification. Does what you currently provide, all add up? Are there things missing?
  • ticket information – ticket ‘conditions of use’ rules, ticket types, validities, and purchase and so forth, can be very confusing – even to those in the know. Simplifying the rules or making the information understandable to your customers will be key to more patronage and greater profit.

 

Getting it right is no mean feat and it sometimes, more often, takes an outsider to take an objective view to help bring all the pieces together.