The card before the horse

Over at the usability weblog, Jasper has a nice post up about the mess that is the new Dutch public transport chipcard-system. It’s a topic of much discussion around here — a lot of people are getting pretty frustrated. And after the news that the fares are also significantly higher when using the new system, some are getting pretty angry as well.

Much of the criticism is aimed at the embarrassingly long list of technical problems and usability issues the system turns out to have at its introduction. But if you look a bit deeper, this really is a story of how introducing such a system for the wrong reasons cripples it from the word go. I fear the whole thing was destined to be a cumbersome failure from the beginning.

OK, I’ll admit, the Dutch system of zoning, paper tickets and stamps is somewhat quirky, but in my humble opinion it’s not really broken or in dire need of replacement. At least not from a user’s perspective. The transport companies however, hate it.

Along with a whole batch of other public services, public transport in the Netherlands was privatized some years ago. The public could care less, as long as they’re able to buy one type of ticket to travel with all the buses, trams and trains across the country. But now that the different companies running them are competing for every Euro spent to get from A to B, those companies are suddenly much more interested in exactly how many people travel where, and how. It used to be that the proceeds from ticket sales were distributed based on guesstimation and general metrics of travel patters. But all those newly founded, profit-driven marketing departments demanded more precise numbers, and the ability to develop offerings aimed at specific groups and areas. Something the existing system cannot provide.

Suddenly our paper tickets were deemed old-fashioned and unreliable. Hopelessly out-dated. Chipcards would be altogether cooler anyway. Out with the old, in with the new.

Now, I’m all for progress. But sadly, ease of use was never the driver behind the introduction of these cards. Marketing and free-market politics were. This is not a case of user-centered design gone wrong. It’s a prime example of supplier-centered design, and the mess that leads to.