If you have had the opportunity to take a bus in Taiwan recently, you will have noticed that many of the station signs have bus arrival displays.
Today, we will not discuss the beauty of these new signs because the public authorities are still unable to find out the word “beauty”, so we do not have much expectation. What I would like to discuss today is the design of bus arrival display, do we need it or not?
I believe the starting point of this design is good, so that people know how much longer they want to wait for the bus to arrive, how to use this time, or when they can not catch up, they can decide in advance to take other transportation…etc. But there is a premise that these times must be accurate, but unfortunately… according to the experience of myself, friends and relatives around, this thing is never accurate, yes, never…
I believe we can all guess why, because the person who designed this thing completely forgot that the bus is driving on the road and not on the track, and there are so many uncertainties that it is hard to estimate the correct time of its arrival. Very often, the above shows that a bus will arrive in 3 minutes, and then it becomes the upcoming stop (which means you can basically see the bus), but sorry, it just happened to meet the red light and traffic jam, the result of the whole wait than the original display of 3 minutes longer, WTF…
Time, in fact, is very easy to make people anxious things, originally do not care much about things, may be because of time, let people enlarge to pay attention to. I believe we have all had this experience, when the big test, most people who are not a student, at least have one or two subjects weaknesses or more; for example, the math test 60 minutes, 30 minutes left when the teacher reminded, we are not so worried, because the time is only half over, but if the teacher reminded the time left 15 minutes when it? People who have not finished writing begin to calculate how much they have not written, how much to check, and whether they can finish writing? As a result, not only wasted a few minutes on unnecessary things, the brain has become more chaotic because of nervousness, could have written properly finished, but also can not write or finish writing …
In fact, in the past, when there was no such thing, people were more relaxed in waiting because everyone had different feelings about time. Sometimes you may feel that you have been waiting for so long already because you are tired from a long day work and want to go home ASAP, but you realized that you only wait for less than 10 minutes. Therefore, my personal design solution would be if this is really so important and convenient, it would be more practical to change it to the bus dynamic system provided by Taipei and Xinbei city governments. Since most people are used to their own bus routes, they have a idea in their mind as to where the bus is now and how long it might take to get there. At least where the bus is now is definitely more accurate than how many minutes away the bus is now.
LOVE YOURSELF
– CHARLIE