Study On The Universal Of Electronic Self-service Facilities

As a certain type of public science and technology facilities, electronic self-service equipments, which include goods-vending machine, medicine-vending machine, information-enquiring machine, ticket-vending machine and so on, have been widely applied to the public with the development of modern society. Among these facilities, ticket-vending machine has been used in the urban rail transportation system in large scale and have gradually replaced manual tickets system. And it is becoming the necessary facility in our daily life.Ticket-vending machine offers services to all the people in the society and to meet all the demands, it has to achieve the universal design. Universal design is a "people-oriented" design idea and method. It has specified the users and paid attention to the demands of users with different characters. Based on it, this paper has established the design standard that can be generally accepted, without raising the cost or losing the individuality. By this, it has eliminated the distance between the vulnerable group and the public in the barrier-free design and achieved the universal care.Because of its important role as well as the application and design status, this paper focused on the "universal design" of the ticket vending machine in the rail transportation. And also focused on the definitions of universal design, principle and theoretical framework. Meanwhile, the actual research was done for the ticket-vending machine in shanghai rail transportation system.The feedback from the users of vending machine is an important basis to redesign. This paper has adopted POE to study the current ticket vending machine. POE is originated from the Environment Psychology in 1960s. It is a standardized and systematic method to collect all the data of users'evaluation toward the environment, through scientific analysis to understand their target environment. POE is a good help for the universal designers enhance awareness of the users'needs. The processes are:(1) Chose 6 subway stations such as in People's square shanghai, Nanjing West Rd etc as observation places and had 7.5-hour observation. Made notes and took photos for 63 users' operation time and problems.(1) Designed the survey questionnaire according to the observation. Made deeper inderstanding of users' psychology and the causes of operational problems through the 98 valid questionnaires.(1) Made the quantitative and qualitative analysis based on the data. Figured out important issues and all the problems in the process point.(1) Made the application analysis according to the research conclusions.Based on the theoretical framework of universal design, the paper has got three conclusions:(1) Made the universal checklist of the ticket-vending machine.(2) Summed up the designing process for ticket-vending machine.(3) Proposed the plan to improve the current ticket-vending machine.The significance of the research is to promote the ticket-vending machine and other electronic self-service facilities in the design to a more humane direction, so that it can be smoothly and widely applied in the social life. The result of the research can be used as the design guidance of the ticket-vending machine, standardizing designers design orocess and maximizing the overall efficiency and quality of design.