Designs on the Games
Tuesday 7th October 2008
Savoy Place, London
Organised by PhoneAbility and the IET
Smart ticketing
by Geoff Doggett
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Just before I start my presentation, just to bring us up to date, I have been very thought-provoked, if that's the word, by a couple of the presentations. Particularly Dr. Stephen Duckworth's point, that really disability is normal.
I have a financial disability at the minute, and I am not a banker! It is society that puts up the barriers to entitlement. I am convinced of that, and I want to talk, bend my talk a little bit, in the next 20 minutes about that aspect, because design for all is good design for people who we put this marker on of having disabilities. So I am enormously grateful for that point because it's burnt into my forebrain somewhere.
And I am also going to make the point about simplicity. My little point at the bottom there, which was burnt on to the front of a woodworking studio when I was at school - "In all things the supreme excellence is simplicity". It sounds a bit ridiculous, it sounds a bit, "Can we achieve this" but it keeps coming back to me that the litmus test we need to apply is, is it simple? The lowest common denominator, not highest common factor. I am not an engineer, I am not a mathematician, I am not an academic.
So I am a visitor here, Mr Faraday, and I am feeling you on my shoulder, but I do feel that the great men, the great engineers, produced governance and simplicity to their user, and being a wonderful man of Victorian and industrial archaeology, you can see it all around us.
So I do ask that anybody involved in specifying, designing, implementing and controlling systems for these massive logistics, the Games, does constantly come back and use the litmus test of simplicity.
I have purged my presentation of acronyms. I am not a scientist or academic. I apologise for that. But there is one which isn't in here which I shall come back to at the end, which is that pretty much all human actions are segmented into four very clear areas.
One is awareness. If we are not aware of what we want to do, aware of a service, we can't do anything more. So awareness is on the whole nowadays information.
We have to get interested in it. We have this mass of information we are presented in. To take the analogy of my previous speaker, of the bus route, I am only interested in route 303. I am not interested in the 49 or anything else. So I have to home in and get myself interested in what I want to do next.
I then have to make a decision. This is relevant to ticketing. I've got to decide I want to go to that event. I know it's on, I know the time and the price. I've got to decide with my family and myself. And then I've got to take action. AIDA. Awareness, interest, decision, action.
It follows us through all of these things, and you will be challenged when you go and have this lovely lunch. I am sure, as you will see all those things out there, you know the lunch is coming, the awareness is there, but you've got to get interest in that sausage roll, to pick it up and eat it. It governs everything we do.
So my topics really for today are to try and give the layman's, simple version of a complex subject which is smart ticketing, but it is a big, big area now.
I was briefed by John to try and look at two separate parts of ticketing. They may be rolled together in a package but they are very different animals. One is the ticketing for venues - hugely complex logistics of quarter of a million people travelling through all the gates and barriers; the right people getting to the right seats and venues, with the seating plans. It's a very complex area. The box office as it's known to those who follow the theatre. But also there's ticketing on transport.
I want to talk a little bit about the customer interfaces and I want to, all being well, show you at the end a very simple demonstration of just what it means in the real world of being able to take personal information and trigger a terminal to give me the sort of information I want, not the information that John wants or anybody else wants.
So the ticketing scene really, if we look at the Games, is "get me to the show on time."
It's a massive thing. The Beijing Olympics was a superb experience for everybody, and I didn't have the privilege, as Stephen Duckworth did, of going there, but it was still magnificent and it was beautifully performed and beautifully organised, and I will say that for the Paralympics as well.
So what do I need to get to the show? I have got to have some booking information. I really expect that nowadays in the language and in the type of communication. I may want it voiced to me. I may want to read it. I may want to feel it. I may want to get it in some other format.
Again, the point Stephen Duckworth made, we travel as groups. We are tribal. We are tribal. I am tribal in my family. I think we are all tribal. Some friends here are in my tribe. My smartcard tribe. I can see one right here and one or two others around.
So we have common interests, a special-interest group if you like, be it the family or whatever. I am a sailing nut. I am going to be down at Weymouth, I can tell you, because I love sailing. It's my hobby, my passion, but I am going to be there with a number of my friends. We are going to all want to be travelling down there and go together.
I have to pay. What is a ticket? It's purely a token, an entitlement. But on the whole these days I am not going to get it for free. I've got to pay. Payment today means no cash. We have to be able to pay without getting cash involved. We are past the days of cash, and there are very many wonderful systems now - assuming the banking system is still around in 2012 - that we can probably pay for things!
We want simplicity. If we are going to use something like a smartcard or a mobile phone, we only want one of those. We don't want 16 different cards. We just want one. It's the sort of thing that smartcards can do well.
We want our transport to operate across all modes. It could be a taxi or a community bus. I live in the depths of Norfolk. Talk about getting to the Olympics. My journey starts with what's called the Border Hopper - a wonderful community bus which takes me to Diss railway station. I want to go right the way through with one experience.
We should be able to package - I am sure the people who have run the Olympics in the past know all this - a lot of pre-booking. We should be able to package transport entitlements and ticketing with the event ticketing ideally. That makes life simpler.
And the point we have touched on - things will go wrong. We must have superb customer service delivered when we want it, how we want to access it. Huge, huge premium put on call centres, because when things start going wrong, I am pretty much picking my phone up. Whether I am ringing my family or an organiser - customer service is essential.
So what have we got at the minute really in ticketing? This is just a very, very broad brain-dump of the sorts of things we have in this country at the minute.
We use a lot of paper tickets with mag stripe. We are going smart, the railway system is going smart quite rapidly. Hopefully by 2012 all the railway operators will be able to accept smartcards and smart tickets.
And how do we buy these tickets? Well, we're still at Diss station, my local station, I walk up and I see John if he's there, and then perhaps if it's a bit late and I am late, John's shut down and I have to go to the other side of the track and operate a rather wonderful ticket machine.
Unfortunately, it faces south and not a single person can see it on a sunny day. We are ferreting around in a great queue. Intelligent design - just face it north and we can see the screen.
Tickets are mainly single-trip tickets. We have a multiplicity of them. I don't know how many people here can tell me how many ticket types we have. About over 80 in this country, probably about 72 too many. We need simpler products. And frequently they are not usable between operators.
How you get yourself through interchange areas. If you are in London, on the whole, the Oyster system, automatic barriers. That's a traditional high volume way of allowing me to exit the system.
But if someone between Liverpool Street and Diss is looking at my token, I just walk out through the doors. People need to interchange between modes of transport and operators.
We have systems which are very familiar to us, to those of us born and brought up in this country. But we have a huge influx of visitors from abroad who will be totally unfamiliar with the ways we do things.
If I am guessing you come from Singapore or New York, you are probably used to far smarter and simpler tokens to use. If you have come from, huh, Norfolk and various other places, you may not be familiar with our ticketing systems. And there aren't really any multimodal systems. We still think trains, buses, taxis. We need to try and get across that.
So what is happening in transport ticketing? Well, the proven format for transport ticketing is pretty much worldwide. It's called the contactless smartcard. Anybody who came by Oyster or used an Oyster card today? Yes, quite a lot. If you haven't used the Oyster card - you are pretty familiar with touching in and out. That's a contactless smartcard. They are very fast to work, low cost, and on the whole they offer - a high degree of security isn't needed for transport ticketing.
Mobile phones are becoming available now with a little reader on the back of the mobile phone, which will operate an RFID or a contactless smartcard, to read that. Because the phone is such a wonderful device - it's our token; the one thing we don't leave home without. Perhaps our smart ticket is the second thing we shouldn't leave home without.
But these phones now have the possibility of interacting with cards, information in real time, and also of course the airtime operators already operate a huge amount of value-added service.
But, but not every mobile phone in 2012 will necessarily be such a phone. So if we are thinking of customers using their phones, mobile phones in this country are fashion items. We change them all the time and it's highly unlikely that any standard will have emerged for that. So it has a constraint but it's getting a very interesting area.
We have a wonderful mass transit scheme. Not the only one in the world by any means, but the Oyster card scheme to me pretty much does what it says on the tin. It's simple, it's relatively easy. It seems to work all the time - other people will give the scare stories, I am sure - but I think it's a great scheme. That is the working model, so thank goodness a lot of the venues for the Olympics, our main venues particularly are in London, so there is already a wealth of experience of operating mass transit smart ticketing in the capital here. I hope that will be built on.
We do have standards here, one called ITSO, which was founded by DFT and is pretty much standard as the specifications for smart ticketing in this country, so we have some standards in place.
We are beginning to get far more 24/7-type automated kiosks and web information kiosks which we can interact with, automatic gates, and that's good. That's mechanisation coming on well, but we need to be able to personalise the use of those.
Just briefly looking at the difference between transport ticketing and event and venue ticketing, the first decision obviously made by somebody is around the venue. " I want to go to see basketball on Tuesday afternoon at the Olympic stadium."
I don't say, "Oh, I can catch a train and then I wonder what I will do at the other end." Clearly, the interest decision, the first decision I am going to make is to fight to book for a venue ticket. Assuming I am not red carpet and haven't been given one.
There are a whole host of details around that booking schemes do with seating plans, reservations and so on, which the venue operator will be controlling, and it is very complicated.
What happens at the moment you sell out? How do you tell the next 100,000 people, "Sorry, no tickets available." What happens when tickets get returned and they become available again? So venue ticketing is a complex business in its own right.
To me, the experience gained in Sydney and in Athens and Beijing will dictate the way venue ticketing systems work. I don't suppose anybody has been bold enough to re-invent something completely. The experience is there, the systems are there, and probably the suppliers are already - have already no doubt got contracts in place to do some of this stuff.
But security is a very important issue. When we are talking about smartcards, this is an important issue, because smartcards can enable very high levels of security, but they are therefore expensive and complex smartcards.
The normal ticketing token we are talking about is a contactless smartcard that costs perhaps a few pence to produce and is a token with relatively low security available on the smartcard itself.
So we may have a clash here between the type of smartcard which might be used by competitors getting into the Olympic village, perhaps more security required in the venue itself, than the casual visitor coming to watch an event.
The usability of how people get the information - web key and call centres - either within the venue or in the immediate vicinity or in the transport system, is quite important. How is that usability going to be there to give great customer service?
The customer services we use for ticketing, be they events or transport, as we have said now, are frequently browser based. We are using the web extensively. It's a fantastic tool and many people with disabilities, as we understand them now, can access that information very, very well, if they happen to be trained and able to use that type of terminal.
If not, call centres are pretty much critical. There's nothing as good as a well-run call centre where I can talk to a real operator about a real issue and get a real answer.
Equally, we see the other end sometimes when we get sitting waiting for ten minutes with music playing and, "Sorry, we are extremely busy" and, "You are being recorded for training purposes." I've lost it!
We need multilingual services in place. I am sure Stephen Duckworth and his team already know which languages are suitable for Olympic events. It's probably quite a lot. Having said there were 300 languages, someone mentioned earlier, spoken in the play grounds of London, somewhere along the line, the line has to be drawn around the box of exactly which languages and dialects are going to be offered. But those need to be delivered pretty much everywhere across the board.
Personalisation does speed things. We all have, as I think I may have mentioned earlier, a series of credentials. My credential is when I have booked to come to the Olympics is the only one that matters to me at that moment in time, and I hopefully want a personalisation like a smartcard to be able to tell the systems a bit about myself so that some automation can take place.
Whether it's, as we will see in a minute, allowing barriers to stay open a bit longer, because I need to get a wheelchair through, or whatever it may be, personalisation will tend to help this push for automation and mechanisation.
We have said we will not have 1.2 million people helping here. If something extraordinary happens, we have something like a 10th of that number, I think, possibly as volunteers - perhaps even less than that.
And so we are going to rely on more tools and more automation to help those situations.
We do often need a receipt. If we have done something, if we have booked a ticket - transport, events or whatever else - we really do need a very clear confirmation that everything is okay, because I am not going to spend £100 going down to Weymouth to watch the dinghy sailing and all the rest of it on the basis I have done something and hopefully I am going to be given a token, be it a paper tokens with holograms on or whatever else. But I want to be pretty certain that my money has bought what I want. So receipting is important in these sort of transactions.
And people, of course, as we have said earlier, do a lot of things in transit systems. They go into the system; I catch my Border Hopper bus, go to the station, go to Liverpool Street. I catch the Central line. I go on the DLR. I've got multiple changes going on in very busy places like Liverpool Street station.
Therefore, the information and the availability for me to be able to understand what's going on, when it starts getting a bit crowded with lots of people, again, it's interestingly quite important.
But we do have some help here, because as far as smartcards and smart tokens are concerned we have some standards, which at least control the ticketing products through this ITSO specification.
So finally really, the innovation side of this. What can we do from now, in October 7th 2008, to produce something spectacular for the summer of 2012. What is feasible? What's do-able?
Well, I believe, and John believes, and Merlin believes, and one or two others believe who have been working for two or three years, that there is an interesting personalisation system, which could p adapted and adopted.
It's called SNAPI, that stands for Special Needs API, which is something programming interface - help me an IT person?
JOHN GILL: Application.
GEOFF DOGGETT: Application Programming Interface. Sorry, it is an acronym. But it is really effectively the little piece of software which works at the top end of an application to work with something else. It's the way that software communicates perhaps.
This is all based on great groundwork from John. It's based on a standard. All systems developed should have standards. They ought to, because you just write the documentation and compare the standard against that in the real world. The relevant standard here is the European standard.
It provides a standardised approach to personalising a terminal. That terminal may be an information terminal, but it could also be a device like a gate. There's absolutely no reason why not. But particularly interesting here is the way in which I, with the credential that I want, can personalise a terminal to give me just that simple information I want, from the mass of information that the databases behind it are holding.
This has been sponsored through John by the RNIB. It's an open-access project. That's very important, and RNIB I have to thank yet again really for acting as the leader, in the sense, in this. But I know John works with a lot of other disability organisations and therefore SNAPI is something which we should all be using to pressurise the system with developers.
And at absolute minimum, it will be able to control and interface around things like fonts, colours, sound, and language of course. So it's not a piece of work just for those with disabilities. It's for all of us who have our preferences and our disabilities, and something like language is an important one.
So I am now going to do something very dangerous and wicked, which I hope is going to work. I hope up in the box there...
We have here (on the screen), I have to ask you to take a big leap and think that this is a ticketing terminal. It's actually a Windows desktop - rather an awful one really, but there it is, there is a Windows desktop.
I have a smartcard and a very simple USB reader attached to a PC.
Because Windows has a whole series of accessibility options - and those of you who do use them know them and they are quite extensive - we are able, by putting the card in - and this will be rather a slow transaction because this is a rather old card; I am using quite old technology. The contactless modern equivalent of this should be able to make this operate in a matter of a second or so, but this will take four or five seconds.
This tells me something has happened, the card has been inserted. And as it works in the...
COMPUTER: I speak English but prefer to speak in Polish. I am living at the... (inaudible)
GEOFF DOGGETT: A lot happened then so I am going to repeat it. What happened is my desk-top changed. It assumed I like black text on yellow background. It also made an announcement, which could be to someone operating a terminal, a customer service person, to say, "Actually I prefer to speak in Polish. I am staying at a hotel in Tower Hamlets." It's talking in English "and please speak slowly". Rather useful information.
I take the card out and everything is immediately reverted for the next person to come up and use. So I will show you that once again. I hope it will work again for me.
COMPUTER: Card inserted.
My name is Jeff. I speak English but prefer to speak in Polish. During the Olympics I am staying at the Tower Hotel in Enfield."
GEOFF DOGGETT: This is a standard piece of configuration software we have had for about a year, I think, John, but we can do certain things with it. It was developed by a colleague of mine, Owen McLaughlin from Smart Citizen. It was useful to help us have a practical tool.
This is typically the configuration software. You will notice I can actually write back to the card at any stage a whole series of configuration issues, mainly in this case focused on Windows disability and the access functions.
I can change messages on the card and so on. So what this card is becoming...
Thank you. Could we go back to the main screen. The card is a very familiar token. If you have a hand bag or a wallet, you will have a dozen of these in there. We all have cards. It's a very useful, familiar format worldwide. Which is why those of us who believe in smartcards like the format.
We are storing on here some relevant information about the credentials that we want to be able to trigger on these terminals.
So many of us believe that customising the terminals in an easy, personalised way - my little passport is here telling the terminal who I am and what I want to do, and how I want to get my information. It's useful.
We would be thinking that, as far as smart ticketing on transport is concerned, pretty much contactless smartcards is where we will be in 2012. There are already probably of the order of eight to ten million in use in this country, for the old person's bus card, for instance, oyster, probably more than that, in Scotland for travel.
I would suggest to you that you take and possibly a third look, those of you who are involved in procuring and the systems design, look at the SNAPI specification. If you contact John or myself we will give you those specifications. They are open access.
Let's hope that, with Stephen and the Board, the 2012 Olympics, first of all, can be very, very British; it can be the caring Olympics, which really has got the accessibility for all. Because we don't need to sub-divide this, and certainly we don't want to create barriers.
Finally, the Smartcard Networking Forum, we have been running for five or six years. We represent the public sector. Our membership is governed by local authority, local government, central government and agencies working within those areas.
We have approximately 700 members, and we tend to - we run events and we are an information source about smartcards.
So if you wish to pursue smartcards a bit more, go to the website, www.scnf.org.uk. I am showing a graphic of the country that shows that we are represented across most local authorities across the UK.
And that is me. So I can smell lunch already! So don't forget, AIDA - to the lunch.
JOHN GILL: Thank you very much, Geoff. (applause)
Are there any burning questions for Geoff?
NEW SPEAKER: Peter. As you know, Geoff, I do a lot of work with smartcards. The concept has been now around for almost 10 years. The birthday is coming up in December. But we haven't got very far. Successive teams of ministers and civil servants haven't done very much.
Do you think that, with the current team, where there has been new civil servants around and there is a new team of ministers - do you think we are going to be able to do any more than just have a streamlined public transport ticketing system in the London area?
A. What a political question! I think we are a general election away. I wouldn't want to interpret what ministers and civil servants do at all in the current circumstances. I am using my sailing passion, we are sailing through some fairly stormy waters in terms of our economy which will dictate the way we act.
If your questions is about ITSO, pretty much adopted in the rail transport system and fairly rapidly adopted across a lot of bus companies - that is where we happen to be in the UK at the minute. Obviously I've got a strong message for central government, but I actually believe the implementation of this is done with operators of transport and via their influencing factors. Very often local government. I am not an ITSO expert, I have to say, to be quite honest.
This, by the way, for everybody else who doesn't understand ITSO, is the 900-page specification which shows how smart ticketing can work end-to-end in the transport system. And it's good. It's not the only one in the world but it's our British one.
Sorry, Peter. I don't know if that answers it, but it's a big political question.
NEW SPEAKER: David Cormby again.
Coming back to the application programme interface, I wonder why the term SNAPI, special needs application programme interface was chosen, when really special needs in many respects refers back to this sort of medical model rather than a social model approach.
I think ARAPI, access requirements application programme interface is much better in terms of getting the information across. So it's that term "special needs" that I am not happy about.
A. Personally, I would be the first to agree. I think John could probably comment, because our working group which looked at this was working three years ago, and perhaps terminology, our sensitivity to terminology has changed, and I personally agree with you.
That is the name of a project at the minute. It's not really got beyond there, and I think your point is very valid, and I believe we should look at that, John, don't you?
Thanks for making the point.| Previous |
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