Money on Wheels

Having been exposed on a daily basis to this extraordinary marketing effort - some lines before the tsunami reaches us.

Many have debated the security issues coming with this new way of settling your bills. But maybe it might be also interesting to anticipate what this way of payment does to the felt value of the transaction itself.

When debit and credit cards were introduced, the perception of the actual value of the sums transferred changed significantly and continues to challenge those who use cards not to spend beyond their means. The main reason being to the day that payments by card are of a far more abstract nature than a payment in cash and people naturally struggle to visualise the transaction as such.

A swipe of a card with no signature or any other means of verification certainly does not stimulate the consciousness of having made a purchase. If this scheme really suceeds with what it was designed for, then so called micro payments will indeed become irreducible - in the users perception.

Combined with your debit or credit card this scheme becomes the perfect tracking device, since it covers the segment, which had been spared by the reach of plastic until now.

On the website of payWave the ‘tremendous’ amount of time the user of the scheme has saved, is the main hook to sell it to us - the consumers. Coming from an interaction design point of view, which in its core subscribes to the notion to increase the transparency of processes where possible and aims to empower the user - this leaves a bittersweet taste.

OK – it’s how many years that we Londoners are using the oyster card as means to get around town? That’s those of us who can’t afford the Bugatti just yet with the congestion charge on top of course. Two or three years? We’re about to approach three years if I am not mistaken.

There is a clear benefit in relieving the waste disposal of several dozens of tons of waste a day through replacing the paper based tickets with a plastic card with a money charged chip on it (yes we’re talking RFID). But the Oyster Card has also changed our experience when travelling.

In the past four days three friends of mine were caught in three separate instances in the barriers simply because they did not have sufficient funds on their prepaid card. And all were totally baffled, insisting that they have travelled on that very day enough to qualify for a day ticket.

You don’t know what that means? Well let me explain: There is a special tariff: a day ticket. With this ticket you can use public transport as much as you want for the duration of a day – you simply pay a fixed amount of money. The pricing scheme is designed to make this day ticket attractive if you use the tube more than three times a day. For a sprawling city like London that makes this ticket very attractive for a lot of people.

The Oyster Card is supposed to work like this: You use it on the Railway, Tubes, trams and buses and as soon as all the single tariffs accumulate a day tickets worth the Oyster card allows you to travel as if you would have bought a day ticket at the start of your journey.

My friends, who were so surprised at not having enough funds on their Oyster Cards all thought that the heavy use of their oyster card on this very day made them qualify for the day ticket tariff.
Now the question is are my friends all really crap in maths or was the “system” wrong.

Well it doesn’t really matter here – since it’s worth pointing out one major thing: We are not longer consciously aware of how much we pay for public transport since the experience of paying for a journey has significantly changed.

In pre-Oyster Card times we had to make our minds up whether we will use the transport often enough on the very day to opt for a day ticket. And there was no doubt whatsoever how much we paid for the travelling. Today we trust a system to cap it in our favour. And since it is out of our hands, we automatically foster some form of distrust.

Is it a fair question to ask how good we feel about using Oyster Cards and trust them to cap in our favour? I for one know that I would love to have a little switch on my Oyster Card which I can press knowing that on my first “Touch-In” I will have started my day ticket!

Crossing the path of ever more CCTV cameras on a daily basis, the average Londoner is fairly resilient towards the sight of one or two cameras. But the owner of this pub, is clearly of the opinion that there is not yet enough of it.

People get upset and debate the aesthetics of wind turbines in the country side these days - when does the debate start about the visually intimidating pollution of our environment with cameras?

After having passed this device so many times on the way to my favorite post office, I thought I record it for future generations.

For everybody to see, this is a box fitted with two phones (the second one being on the other side) and a cash machine. Obviously the company behind it combined the two applications based on the usage of the same infrastructure and thought this would be a good idea. Which it might be - with the cash machine doing significantly better.

Since the usage of the two services is in terms of interaction very similar, I thought it might be quite interesting to put this academic question forward: How would a device look like which combines the two services? How would one use it? What would the user experience be like for the respective services?