On Thursday I began my usual trip home to visit my family. The first leg of said trip is taking the train to my cousin’s house in Westchester County where my car is parked. Then I proceed to drive the rest of the way. This is a trip I’ve made a ton of times, and it’s always gone pretty smoothly. This time however there was a glitch in the system.
While sitting and waiting for my train out of the city, I noticed that during rush hour there are a LOT of trains moving through (no big surprise). I also noticed that there were a lot of last minute changes and announcements (again not surprising). What happened next is also not a big surprise, however, it proves my point. A train approached the track I was waiting by at the exact time that my train was supposed to arrive. I waited for the announcement telling us what train had arrived, but nothing came. I saw the train and it was definitely not the train that I usually take so I sat back to continue waiting. However the sign that announces the train’s arrival said that this was my train. Still no overhead announcement. So I got on and the doors closed behind me. I asked which train I was on, and it was not the right one. Now the kind conductor and fellow riders helped get back on track, and come to find out I was only 30mins off track of my original departure but I couldn’t help but reflect on the situation as one involving user experience. I should also mention that a fellow rider did the exact same thing that I did while rushing to make the train.
The point that I came to was that no matter how well we work to define experiences both physical and virtual, there will always always always be human error. It is humans that are responsible for announcing the trains, and in this case it was confusion with what train to announce, but it could be human error in code or some other virtual error. We are all probably very aware of this, but the reason I’m pointing this out is that now I will try to think more about where those potential human errors can take place, help decrease them, but also help to create experiences around them (to make their effects less). This incident helped me to have one other approach to my work in experience design. I hope that it gets you thinking as well :-).
UX
User Experience