Posts tagged “paris”

David Serrault is an Information Architect and Experience Designer for SNCF, in France. 

It took a long time and several discussions with the stakeholders from SNCF (the French railways operator) to receive authorisation for a field investigation using old-age simulation suits.  We were to focus on Gare Du Nord, the largest railway station in Europe.  The station hosts more than 190 million passengers a year, including commuters, long distance travelers from all across Europe, businessmen and tourists from anywhere in the world.  Gare Du Nord is filled with people in movement, following their daily routine or finding their way in this complex ecosystem of platforms, corridors and stairs, all managed by several operators. 

I have always been fascinated by railway stations.  Even more than the airport, I think that they are like temples of modernity, ruled by time and noisy, heavy, industrial technology. 

The goal of this onsite experiment was to evaluate the gaps in the information provided to travelers, especially older ones.  The old-age simulation suit makes the user feel the constraints of an elderly person.  The suit, made in Japan, looks like a kind of kimono such as one might wear for practicing judo.  But this one is green and red, covered with belts and weights in order to simulate the physical constraints of an old person.  Also, you have to wear glasses to restrict your visual field and reduce your ability to perceive contrasts as well as ear plugs to reduce your hearing. 

We were four: my friend and colleague Christophe Tallec (a French service designer) and two students.  We set out in the morning for our day of experimentation.  Indeed we were a bit worried by working in such a crowded public space.  Even with an official authorisation from the station officer it was difficult to imagine what the reaction of the police authority and the users of the station would be.  The place had been a scene of a spontaneous riot a few months before, when a young boy from a low wage suburb commonly called “Banlieusard” had been arrested and assaulted by the police. 

The main difficulty we faced was more a logistical one.  Each of us was to attempt a pre-defined journey through the railway station but we had to find a place to put on the suit.  Eventually we did this behind some ticket vending machines that were close to the bus station.  Not a very intimate place, but good enough! 

Surprisingly the police simply came to ask us what we where doing and then let us do our job.  We didn’t encounter special reactions from the passengers who seemed to deliberately ignore us. 

This experiment was a revelation, especially for the youngest members of the team.  We realised how many constraints someone with physical limitations can face during journey through a public space like this one.  These spaces are dedicated to people flow, but disabled or challenged individuals are like aliens.  There are many initiatives to make these areas accessible and readable but how can this be a priority for an organisation that has to manage daily security and transit efficiency for millions of people.  It is a huge challenge for the designers and the architects who work for these places. 

Eventually we realised that indeed a few passengers were staring at us, especially ones who were dressed as Sailor Moon, Naruto or other manga and video game heroes.  The day of our research was also one of the largest conventions for Japanese culture aficionados in Paris.  Japan Expo is known for its concentration of “cosplay” practitioners; many these young adults were simply in their costume to the event by public transit. 

From their side, I suppose they were wondering what kind of manga persona we were playing.  From my side, I felt like I was at the meeting point between modern and post-modern times. 

Michael Pollan on the cultural shifts revealed by themes in food-related TV entertainment – The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit…Buying, not making, is what cooking shows are mostly now about — that and, increasingly, cooking shows themselves: the whole self-perpetuating spectacle of competition, success and celebrity that, with “The Next Food Network Star,” appears to have entered its baroque phase.  The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about what’s cooking than who’s cooking. 

Understand My Needs – a multicultural perspective – A Japanese usability professional compares the norms of service that retailers provide in Japan with those elsewhere (say, his experience living in Canada), and then contrasts that to the common usability problems found in Japanese websites.  Culture is a powerful lens to see what causes these differences, and how usability people can help improve the experience. 

Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red.  Then cover it with layers of gloss.  Is the result art or advertising?  The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference.  A museum or outside a restaurant? 

Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It.  But they start with the big red rhino, too. 

Trash receptacles such as this are very common in Paris.  The words on the bag translate as Vigilance and Cleanliness.  The bag is transparent so anything discarded is still visible.  London, presumably because they have more recently experienced terrorist bombings, has no (or almost no) rubbish containers. 

Paris uses painted metal barricades…

…while London uses these open-structured plastic segments to block off areas for construction.  Other than path dependence (that’s just how they’ve always done it), why? 

I guess it’s popular enough that two of their locations (above) are on the same block.  I was amused at how ugly that name is in English, though.  Flubber biscuit?  Definitely not appealing to my culturally-based linguistic sense. 

When we were in Hong Kong last year, we took the tram up to Victoria Peak.  The experience is quite dramatic, crawling up an incredibly steep incline. 
Since it’s on a cable, at each stop along the way you feel the sway up and down until the doors open, and of course all the blood is rushing to the back of your brain, and the world outside the train is diagonal.  Multisensory displacement! 

Another toilet picture, dedicated to Gene, who I influenced with my healthy interest in toilet interactions. 

From my hotel room in Paris last month.  How do you flush this one?  Turns out that it’s the middle silver panel.  Although there’s little visual indication, the panel is hinged behind just enough that it can be pushed along the bottom.  There are almost-invisible letters on the bottom right corner.  The left and right panels do nothing, by the way. 

At first I thought that circle-in-a-square was some flush button, but it’s a deodorant puck. 

One of the fun yet challenging aspects of spending two weeks in another country was stumbling over all the little things that I know how to do back home but didn’t work.  I paid for a snack using pocket change, and eventually had to hold the pile of coins out to the counter dude so he could take the right amount.  The coins say their value, in English, but in order to complete a transaction in the normal amount of time, you have to be familiar.  It was an interesting feeling, to be such a foreigner. 

At another point, I was riding the DLR (train) with my Oyster (smart card).  A conductor comes along to swipe the card and there’s a small interaction where the passenger holds out the card and the conductor holds out the wand (yes, it was a wand, not the usual credit-card-swipey-slot thing).  I wanted to put my card on top of his wand, but he wanted to put his wand on top of my card.  I was just supposed to know the gesture.  Sounds like a bit of a dominance issues, actually. 

In using the self-check at Tesco (a grocery store), I realized the software was the same as what I’ve seen here at Home Depot, etc.  but when it came time to pay, the voice prompt told me to insert my card into the chippenpin device.  Turns out this was Chip-and-PIN, where credit cards and/or ATM cards have extra security via an embedded chip, and an associated PIN.  These readers use a different swipe gesture, with the card going in the bottom of the keypad.  Anyway, I stood there with my non-chipped credit card, putting it in and out of this bottom slot, to no avail.  After I surrendered and paid cash, I realized there was the familiar vertical swipe slot along the bezel of the monitor, a different piece of hardware than the chippenpin. 

And this one was subtle but confounding:
This is the TV remote from my Paris hotel room but the London hotel had a similar issue.  In my experience, the red power button turns the TV on and turns the TV off.  But in both these hotel rooms (and maybe this was a hotel issue more than a Euro issue) the way to turn it was to press the channel buttons.  Enter a channel and the TV would go on and display that channel.  The power button was actually on “off” button.  You can imagine me sitting in front of the TV with a remote and trying to turn it on, in vain, until frustrated random button press gave me the result I wanted. 

I often look around at local transit and marvel at how much the cues and other information in those systems are designed for people who already know how to use them; but I was able to plan for and learn about transit enough to be come a fairly comfortable user.  It was these small interactions without cues, and under time pressure, where I found myself bemusedly incompetent.