As November weather arrived in San Francisco, I have been riding the bus more frequently when I was cruising around the city for various meetings, meetups, events and such.
Since my first bus ride I found it very interesting that you actually pull on a string, which runs on the sides of the bus (on the windows) to signal that you want to exit at the next stop. After 'the pull', a light in the front of the bus turns on and an audible signal lets you and the other people on the bus know, that something is going to happen. The bus stops, you push that bar on the bus' door to get out - door opens - walk outside. Done.
So there is a really 'hard' physical and mechanical process going on to tell the driver to halt and wait for you to get your ass off the bus. And there is another physical process when you actually push the bar to open the door.
I am sure everybody rode the bus once or twice but here is a picture to show how that bar, which opens the door, looks.
You can push it, smack it, lean on it, hold your backpack against it - Whatever you do, the door opens. As you are already moving towards the exit this usually goes in one movement.
So.
For a little bit more than a year now (and I have really no idea if that time estimate is correct) there are some new buses rolling around the city. They are supposed to be more comfortable to sit in. Of course they are a bit cleaner. The windows are not yet that scratched by some dumbasses etc. The new buses also have a string, which you pull to indicate that you want to exit at the next stop. There also is an audible and visual signal to inform about the next halt. In addition to that, they have nice red 'STOP' buttons which you can push with one finger. The strings however are about a foot higher than the strings in the old buses and I have seen people reaching, in their trained motion to stop the bus, above their head and not finding the string with the first or second try. After looking up though, seeing the new yellow string and pulling it, usually everything goes OK.
However, when it comes to exiting the bus, the real problems start! The bar on the door is gone! Instead there is a big yellow sticker saying 'TOUCH HERE TO OPEN DOOR'. It has a stylized hand and below that, the spanish translation of 'TOUCH HERE TO OPEN DOOR'.
What the fuck? Who the fuck came up with that idea? I was on the bus for about ten blocks that night and 6 times the bus driver had to yell 'Don't push it! TOUCH!'. He had to come back twice and help people to exit. The problem? The door doesn't open if you push it. No matter what you do (pushing, smacking, leaning, backpack, etc) it won't let you out. So you go from a bar, which you could treat any way, and it would let you out, to a yellow sticker, in the same place, with the same dimensions, which only lets you out when you gently put your fingertips on it. (And even then it only works in 40% of the tries).
Yes, I must admit, the sticker says 'TOUCH' and
why can't people just fucking do what the signs tell them? First of all: What the hell does 'TOUCH' mean? This is a really different thing to different people. It's not like 'Click' and 'Right-Click'! Man... oh man. When I was a child, we had a carpentry (it's still there, but I am not). If you let the Russian guy, Sergej, who worked there, 'touch' something and compare it to the 'touch' of my granny - Two totally different worlds! How can you assume that a user will know exactly how to touch the door to open it? 'Open sesame'!?!?
Second of all: Do you really think anybody reads the stupid sticker and does anything different than he or she is used to do? The sticker has the same place and same dimensions as the old-school handle. It also has the hand-symbol on it. Why would anybody assume that it functions differently and that you have to carefully follow some new instructions? After all we are on a bus! Not a NASA mission.
How stupid can a designer be to really think that this works? During the bus ride of ten blocks, I have seen more user-frustration, than I saw in the last year when I was watching people figuring out how to connect their laptops to a beamer and display the same image on both, their laptop-screen, and the white surface at the end of the meeting room. I am not a haptic interface designer, and I am not a bus driver either, but somebody came up with this concept of replacing the bar with a touchable door + sticker and I think it's the most stupid thing I have ever seen while sitting in a bus in San Francisco. And I have not seen few of them there!
Thanks for reading anyways.
Do you have that 
It is always nice to integrate easy to use APIs into your own site or software. When you are working in this area, it is especially nice is to have an integration with 1D Barcodes and 2D Codes where you don't have to take care of rendering or decoding of images. If you are not working with Barcodes yet, this might be the time to start exploring the possibilities of 2D Codes as a real-world entry to online information.
As the first of it's kind, Snappr.net has a video out with a demo on how to scan 1D Barcodes and shop mobile with your iPhone. It works pretty well, as long as you have a steady hand and enough light for the camera.
