Parking meters are typically irksome to use in whatever guise they take. This, one of the latest generation of Sydney parking meters, I find particularly annoying.
There are two ways to pay. One is with coins, the other with a credit or pre-pay card. Arranged around the liquid crystal display (which is completely illegible at night despite the faint LED lighting) are four buttons: minus, plus, cancel and P.
To pay by credit card, you press the plus button until you have the desired end time, then press the P button and insert your card to pay. Because each parking spot is priced differently in Sydney this is a very handy function. It helps you get an idea of what the parking will cost before committing to it.
Naturally, when you want to pay cash you want to use the same function, for instance to find out whether the shrapnel in your wallet will suffice.
The problem is that once you’ve used the plus and minus buttons to set a time and are happy (well, not happy as such) with the cost, you cannot enter coins into the slot. It is simply blocked. No explanation why, you just can’t put any cash in the machine. To do so, you’ll first have to hit the cancel button, but the machine doesn’t tell you that.
Why block the coin slot in the first place?
Nothing much, just one of life’s little UX annoyances.
good post, but i think you’re being way too kind to the manufacturer.
the screen, presumably to help wheelchair-bound users, is only about four feet high, so although it helps a minority of users, it hinders the majority of users, who have to bend double to see a screen with the narrowest viewing angle you’ll find in technology today.
not only is it impossible to read at night time, it’s also impossible to read in bright sunlight, and impossible to read with polarised sunglasses.
needless to say, if English is not your first language there’s a big barrier too.
now let’s talk about the placement of buttons — the plus and minus buttons are either side of the screen, which would work fine if the cancel and pay buttons weren’t at the bottom of the screen, leaving most users in doubt as to whether they’re about to add more parking time or pay an amount before they’re ready.
finally, the customer service is appalling: call to notify them that one of *their* machines is broken and you have to wait on hold for quite a while before you’re put through to an operator, who asks you to quote the serial number on the machine, meaning you can’t just walk away and get to your appointment, you have to wait there to read it out (unless you’re good at remembering six digit numbers).
then, the operator will quote you another six digit alphanumeric string that *you* have to remember to quote if you get a ticket for not paying for your parking.
and THEN you have to find another ticket machine, which can be 400m there and back, buy a ticket, and put it on your dash.
there should be a button on the top of the meter that you can push that sends a radio pager message back to the operators to inform them of a malfunction. yes, you’d get a lot of false reports, but you should also be able to run diagnostics on the unit remotely and be able to tell whether the fault report is correct or not.
grrrr….