It's World Usability Day on 13th November, and the theme is transport. User- and customer- experience design for public transport is a huge, multi-facetted topic, and one which we're fascinated by at Flow. In fact, Flow is sponsoring the UPA's London meeting, so that people can talk about it over a beer.

For the blog, though, we'll just confine ourselves to a simple report about the customer experience of a Eurostar trip from one of our UX consultants, Simon Johnson. Happy World Usability day!

Cramped queues at eurostar check-in

Fellow travellers,

Has anyone noticed how poor crowd management is at Eurostar?

The instructions for which line you should stand in are positioned at the wrong end of the line. It's not until you join a queue and proceed to the front that you are informed that you are in the in/correct line. Of course this causes all sorts of tension as people realise they need to move over into another queue - committing a social faux pas by now being forced to get in front of others.

The whole experience is littered with insufficient staff, lack of clear guidance, ad-hoc A4 print-outs with make-do instructions, broken ticket machines, stressed people. At both ends there is no system for separating those booked for immediate departure and the hundreds of punters who have arrived early for the later train.

The coach numbers printed on the platform are so worn out so it's difficult to read them. It won't be long before they have disappeared altogether. The coaches are numbered in dark grey on a muddy LCD grey backgrounds in small text.

A great deal of the overcrowding is due to the fact that Eurostar allocated so much room for after-check-in shopping. However, the opportunity to buy anything is zero, as they only allow you to check-in when your train is ready to depart. As a result, the retail area is empty of customers, while the waiting area is crowded with unhappy customers. Mais alors!

In the 21st century with years of breakthroughs in ergonomics, logistics, psychology, usability, crowd management, human factors, etc. and €billions, couldn't Eurostar have foreseen these problems? Moreover, now this problems are horribly evident, why aren't they being addressed tout de suite? Wasn't the Eurostar team packed with 'experts' touting university degrees from esteemed colleges? Quite frankly my mother could have done a better job, no kidding.

Simon

......

Take a look: Flow has made a real difference to the experience of planning and booking travel for companies like EasyJet, Transport for London, and National Express East Coast, Lastminute.com and Hotels.com.