16Jun / 2010

Flashcode in Paris – Bus Route and Advertisement

Since January 2010, Bus stops all over Paris is starting to have Mobiletag‘s Flashcode printed on the bus route. Flashcode is a two-dimensional barcode system similar to QRCode, which has been in use in Japan for years.

: [1] bus route containing a Flashcode

: [2] Closer look at the Flashcode block

: [3] Paris Metro advertisement showing a Flashcode for easy access to the website

: [4] A closer look at the metro ad

I have never been to Paris before, but my cousin who has been living in France for the last 6 years told me that she had never seen such squarely barcode until recently. In fact, during my 10-day stay in the city, I could see only a handful of such barcode appeared on posters and banners. I am suspecting that handheld devices which can handle Flashcode is still not common (still a lot of people are using old Nokia handsets), so there is less incentive for mobile device providers to offer such functionality. Hopefully the new generation of smart phone with built-in barcode reader and 3rd-party app can help to solve the problem.

I blogged about Mobio and other mobile payment platform that utilize such 2-D barcode technology. See my previous posts:

Update:

For more posts about QRCode, please check out these related posts.

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08Sep / 2009

Design for Emergency, Canada Line Emergency Door Release

I often see designs that make various assumptions and expectations to their users, whether it is culture, language, education level, gender, or “common sense”. These assumptions are usually hard to detect, as the testing process is usually deliberate and staged in a controller environment. But when the design is approved and applied to the real world, how well can they actually function?

Some designs can get away from it, since the usage environment might not be life-threatening. But when we are talking about designing for emergency experience, a tiny fraud can result to injury or even death. When an untrained, average person is put into a distressed situation, how well can one remain calm and operate smoothly, as many engineers assumed, to get out of danger?

Emergency door release in train

The picture above is taken from the Canada Line. If you look carefully into the picture, you might notice that there is an emergency door release switch located at the upper-right corner of the slide door. But I think it is very invisible to most people. Here is why:

The switch box is painted in the same colour as the interior of the train, except the small prints in red which I can positively argue that it fails the 10-foot test: you can neither read nor guess the meaning of the message if you read it from 10 feet away.
In distressed situation, most people cannot remain calm, stand in front of the sign and spend 10 seconds to read the instruction carefully. The instruction will become a blurry Blah Blah Blah. In fact, as one of my strongest peronsal design belief, “NO BODY READS MANUAL”.
Oh, and here it’s assumed that all passengers can read English. If you’re a visitor from non-English speaking country coming to Vancouver 2010 winter olympic, sorry to say that if there’s any emergency you are more likely to be trapped in the train.

"In Emergency break cover rotate handle open door" Run-on sentence?

Suggestions:

Use pictures and icons. And not just an artistic abstract Picasso picture, I’m talking about internationally well-known or standard graphical signage, or if non exists, design a new graphic carefully and test it with real people in unbiased tests.
Add contrast. Tons of web design / graphic design books has already mentioned it, and it’s really just common design sense. Use high contrast and “alert” colour such as Yellow/Black zebra stripe, or red.
Make the cover semi-transparent. This way, most people can still see what’s inside the box in normal condition, and unconsciously teach themselves how to use it. I found similar design in fire alarms and first-aid cabinet.

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01Sep / 2009

Canada Line Passenger Experience – “Way Out”

Way out

A good design should be so easy to understand that you don’t even need any conscious effort to get it. To archive such low affordance (how self-explaining the object design is), a few points should be noted:

adhere to international standards
use of standard graphical elements
avoid assumption of language, culture or other kinds of special target group.

In my opinion, the Canada Line subway station is doing something unnatural and annoying to me: use of “Way Out” instead of “Exit”. Given that I’m a Chinese where English isn’t my first language, this sign label immediately raise doubts in my multi-cultural mind. The word “EXIT” is almost the golden standard for indicating the exit route of a building. It is so ubiquitous and short that even non-English speakers should have no problem recognizing it just like a graphical symbol.

“EXIT” also seems to be the only legally permitted standard word by the fire department to be used to indicate emergency exits. You can see nothing but “EXIT” in all the sign boxes with red-lighted label on them. May need research to support my claim.

If you look carefully into the sign in the picture above, it’s not hard to realize that the “Way Out” label is printed on a sticker that is put on the sign after the fact. I wonder if there were some management decisions behind it, or if it is supported by any user research and scientific statistics.

Below is a few slides I used for a presentation a year ago that talked about usability. There are few problems:

Language barrier: assuming you already know this is a washroom, but if you don’t read Chinese then it’s hard to tell which side is the men’s washroom.

Culture barrier: here if you don’t read the Japanese comic “DORAEMON” (or Ding-Dong if you’re from Hong Kong), you don’t know exactly which character is a boy and which is a girl.