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To Snapper or not to Snapper

Posted by Owen Evans on Friday, July 25th, 2008

So for those who aren’t in Wellington, the local busses are starting to completely roll out the new Snapper card payment system. If you’re from the UK think Oyster.

Let me first off say that I REALLY want to like this system, I loved travelling round London on the Oyster, and putting my monthly passes on it, just for the fact that I used to hate the waste of paper that comes from printed tickets, and passes.

However the Wellington snapper system really has a few too many flaws for my liking:

• I can’t top up online, I have to go to a store and do it, which is really inconvenient for me. I used to buy oyster card top-ups online all the time, sure you have to nominate a station to top up at (can we have this as bus stations) but it means I’m not having to go out of my way to top up.
• I have to pay a service fee for topping up the card, this really really sucks, so badly that I’m thinking of not getting one. Sure it’s a micro amount, (50cents 20 cents), but it means I have to top up with larger amounts rather than carrying around small amounts on the card that would make me feel safer trusting it (I don’t want to loose a card that has $100 on but I wouldn’t mind so much if it only had $10 on it)
  • I think the cost here should be on the people who save money from printing less tickets/receipts

There’s also one thing that’s bugged me about the roll out, and this relates to the fact that there seems to be very little training or contingency training carried out. Let me relate the story of today’s trip into work:

The bus that picked us up was an older model trolley bus (not known for their reliability), on board was a brand new snapper set up and as we got on we would have the ability to use a Snapper (this is now pretty much the case on 100% of busses in the morning), however it became pretty evident that the snapper hardware was not really up to scratch, I noticed that four times on the way to the city centre (a ride of 20 mins in the morning traffic) the central unit on the drivers console threw a wobbly (screen went fuzzy and at one point made a very loud,very bad hissing sound) resulting in a system reboot. Each reboot took about 2 minutes to get the readers working again.

During one of the crashes the bus stopped at a bus stop to let people on (after all that’s what bus stops are for) the one person who got on wanted to use their snapper card (after all that’s what the snapper is for) also one person wanted to get off, and as you have to record getting off as well as getting on (otherwise I presume you get charged the maximum amount) the guy getting off was a bit pissed off the snapper readers weren’t working (while the machines rebooted)

I have absolutely no problem with the fact that the machine crashed, I don’t mind the fact that the snapper wasn’t usable, however the reaction of the bus driver in this instance was wrong, rather than having a contingency plan, the driver instinctively went defensive about technology, the usual phrases came out “don’t blame me, it’s this damn system”.  Where was the training or the processes to do the following.

1. The guy who wanted to get off really wasn’t happy to be waiting, perhaps in order to get people used the snapper, the guy should be allowed to get off without “tagging”, the driver could give him the bus number and there should be an easy way to say “hey I was on this bus, the system wasn’t working when I got off at this stop so I didn’t get to tag off” these cases should hopefully be few and far between that the cases of fraudulently saying someone got off a stop they didn’t would be few and far between, but the user experience wouldn’t be affected. As it stands however I’m pretty sure that the guy thinks the whole snapper thing sucks.
2. The bus driver should be informed enough to know that a crash is a crash, the first thing people want to know is how long they’re going to be inconvenienced for, am I going to be waiting 30 minutes? 2 minutes? an hour? they didn’t know, and the bus driver wasn’t informed enough or confident enough to give the reassuring answer they were looking for, “look I’m really sorry, the system will be back in a minute or two, just wait there and it’ll be back” not the best, the customer is still inconvenienced more that the classic paper based system, but they aren’t too worried.

I hope the teething troubles of snapper get ironed out. I really want the system to work, it’s fast and convenient when it works. All promise at the moment, let’s wait for the delivery.

Posted in: [snapper|usability|wellington].