Abstract
Mobility as a key element in the dynamics of any city, a development potentiator and resilience factor, is vital for transforming megalopolis into Smart Cities. However, due to numerous elements that interact within urban mobility, solutions are hard to accomplish. Since public transport is crowded in large cities, the process for buying a ticket must be shortened as much as possible. However, even when machines are used for selling tickets in the Mexican public transportation system, not the entire population has access to the variety of payment methods other than the use of cash. Moreover, there is a wide mixture of others who also interact with the machine such as those involved in maintenance, surveillance, and cash collectors. Based on the information gathered and the steps from the user centered design methodology, a design proposal for improving the interaction was conceived.
This paper presents the process that was followed for designing a Ticket Vending Machine (TVM) for Mexico City’s public transport, through which human-machine interaction was made simpler and easier to follow compared to previous TVMs and thus refining a key interaction in mobility for a more efficient transport system. The results and the design proposal could be useful for tackling human-machine interaction concerning other products such as automated teller machines, parking ticket machines and other TVMs for public transport in other cities or countries with a similar panorama.
The implementation of the user-centered design methodology involves the users at each step of the process to understand and tackle their needs when prototyping and testing are conducted. The methodology boosts the innovation and allows faster implementation of ideas, due to its flexibility throughout the iterative process, which is an advantage compared to linear methodologies where feedback is gathered until the end of the process and not during the development of new products and services.
