I spent some of today heading south from Crewe on a Virgin train. Their trains are pretty new, and seat reservations aren’t indicated by a bit of paper on the seat. Instead, there’s a little screen on the luggage rack that says whether the seat’s free (‘This seat is not reserved’) or taken.
If it’s taken then it says the stations the seat has been reserved between. This is handy – if the display says ‘Birmingham to Reading’ but you’re already well out of Birmingham, it’s safe to assume that the person meant to be in the seat hasn’t turned up, so you can take it yourself.
The benefits to the train company are obvious; there’ s no need to send staff through the train to put the right reservation cards on the right seats. One button and (presumably) it’s done.
Unfortunately it was all a bit too confusing for one of my fellow passengers today. At first he didn’t spot the screen. And then when he did, he assumed the seat was free because nowhere did it use the word ‘reserved’.
It was a busy train, and I’m honestly not sure if he was telling the truth or just pleading ignorance in the hope he’d be allowed to keep the seat. But either way, Virgin could make things clearer. It got me wondering whether a copywriter had written the text, or if they’d just gone with whatever the person who wrote the software put there.
A couple of small changes is all they’d need. They could add ‘Reserved from…’ to the copy on each screen. And some well-placed notices explaining how reserved seats are indicated would make it crystal clear. The displays aren’t that obvious, unless you’re particularly tall or know where to look.
Little changes like this can make a big difference when you’re trying to get a message across. The principle applies to websites as well – and one of the great things about working online is that it’s usually easy to make the edits.
I’ve not really got into the social networking thing. Sure – I’ve been on MySpace a bit, but only ever to listen to new bands. There always seemed to be far too many 14-year-olds using it to actually be worth signing up to.
But over the last couple of weeks it feels like another site has suddenly reached critical mass: Facebook. Loads of my friends have been talking about it – even in the pub, when they should be talking about football, music or making rubbish jokes. And it seems like they’ve all been using it.
I signed up yesterday. It’s a bit of a MySpace for grownups. You can tell people what you’re up to, share photos, and generally exchange banter and gossip. I can see why some of my friends say it’s addictive.
It’s all about building networks. You start by adding the people you know as friends on Facebook. It’s really easy, because the website can read your Hotmail / Yahoo / Gmail address book and automatically add anyone in that to your list of friends.
Be careful – I nearly emailed 107 contacts from my Google address book, including former and current colleagues and clients. Could be embarrassing if all you meant to do was contact a few selected people.
Then you can see their friends, and add them to your friends list, and so on. I haven’t quite worked out the etiquette yet, but it’s clear that you don’t have to have met in person to be friends on Facebook.
It’ll put you in touch with former colleagues, schoolmates and all sorts. Which is fine if you want to talk to them all. I just can’t help thinking that sometimes you lose touch with people for a reason. And it’s a pretty open network – so I’d definitely be concerned about making too much personal information too public.
Having said that, I’ve hardly scratched the surface. I’ll stick with it and report back. My plan is to stay fairly low-key for the next week or so and see what happens. Then I might go crazy adding friends, just because I want to be popular.
Spotted in Friar Street, Reading, last night: a black cab covered in advertising for local radio station 2Ten FM.
Apparently they play “Todays music”. That’s debatable. But you’d have thought they’d check the punctuation before slapping it on the side of a taxi in foot-high letters.
