New Usability Issues

Abstract

Personal technologies can solve many serious technical and usability design problems of walk up and use technologies, which are used in public spaces to provide information, tickets and other essential services. For concreteness, we compare a state-of-the-art automatic ticket machine with the possible improved designs using radio communication with personal technologies, such as wearable computers. New technologies can improve the user experience significantly, as well as making these complex systems easier to implement. The new approaches have numerous additional advantages: they are easier for disabled users, resist vandalism better, and are easier to implement; on the other hand they raise quite new usability issues.