Mobility as a key element in the dynamics of any city, a development potentiator, and a resilience factor, is vital for transforming megalopolis into Smart Cities. Nonetheless, due to the number of elements that interact within urban mobility, solutions are hard to accomplish. Public transport is crowded in large cities so the process for buying a ticket has to be reduced as much as possible. However, even when machines are used for selling tickets in the Mexican public transportation system, not the entire Mexican population has access to the variety of payment methods rather than the use of cash. Moreover, there is a wide mixture of users that also interact with the machine such as maintenance, surveillance, and cash collectors. Based on the information gathered and the steps from the user-centered design methodology, a design proposal for improving the interaction was conceived.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As a result, this paper presents the design process that was followed for designing a Ticket Vending Machine (TVM) for Mexico City’s public transport, where human-machine interaction was improved in order to be simpler and easy to follow in comparison with previous TVMs and therefore refining a key interaction in mobility for a more efficient transport system.&nbsp;The process included four phases: The first two of them were related to getting in touch with the user and understanding the problem at its core. In these stages, the team organized observations in different modalities from public transport in order to identify how users buy a ticket and the payment methods that were available. Then, a focus group was organized for understanding first, how people interact with elements from different machines and second, for identifying which sounds and colors are related to visual and audible alerts that indicate to the user whether the interaction was successfully completed or if there was a mistake or an error within the process for buying a ticket. The third and four phases were related to the product, ergo for designing the new concept of TVM. In these phases, the conceptual proposal was defined and modified as long as feedback from different stakeholders was collected. Then, the design proposal was built using CAD software for creating a model which was mechanically tested and two last prototypes were built: One for testing the user interaction and the other one related to the functionality of the entire system. Finally, the documentation allowed the manufacturing department to build the first prototype that is expected to be tested on-site.The results and the design proposal could be useful for tackling human-machine interaction with other products such as automated teller machines, parking ticket machines as well as other TVMs for public transport in other cities or countries with a similar panorama.

Human Machine Interaction: A Design Proposal of a Ticket Vending Machine for Public Transport-Machine Interaction: A Design Proposal of a Ticket Vending Machine for Public Transport

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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