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Take with one hand, take with the other

What a shock it was this morning to discover there’s been another technical problem with the myki ticketing system. The Age today reported that myki will be deducting money from thousands of customers bank accounts as a result of transactions not being processed.

So let’s get the story straight:

Users of the myki system who have been undercharged as a result of failed bank transactions don’t need to worry. A lump sum payment will be deducted from their accounts on October 14th, so long as the amount is under $100. No need to worry! Myki will make the calculations and deduct the appropriate amount. Automatically. Without the need for the customer to intervene.

Users of the myki system who have been overcharged on the other hand, which has been known to be occurring since at least December last year, can expect myki to do absolutely nothing. No automatic reimbursement, no periodic auditing of your statement, nothing. In fact, if you want to ensure that you are paying the correct fare, you can trawl over your statement in your free time, make the calculations, and then contact the customer service line to make your case. You could submit your statement to MykiLeaks for automatic assessment, but that involves trusting your personal information with a complete stranger (hi, that’s me), which is neither endorsed nor recommended by myki or the TTA.

Is it just me, or does this seem slightly unfair? Myki should start reclaiming their own lost coin when (and only when) they have audited every single myki account for overcharges, and reimbursed customers who have been duped by this mathematically challenged system.

I’ve already witnessed myki being used as a Software Engineering case study of how to not build a system, is it really going to become a case study for Public Relations experts as well?

I can’t draw

Being a software developer doesn’t give you any sort of license to design beautiful things, particularly when you can’t draw, like me. Yet every development role I’ve ever been employed in has required some sort of UI design, and in most cases a small amount of web design. Understandably on larger projects the work is more cleanly split between developers and designers, but on the small-medium end of project sizes it’s reasonable to expect that a developer can do more than just write lines of code.

In the two rounds of computing studies I have undertaken I’ve found that design theory has been grossly understated, to the point where it’s almost non-existent. Obviously web design is a field in its own right, and for a comprehensive education in this area you don’t study Computer Science. Why though, is design not more integrated throughout Computer Science and related degrees, even if only very mildly?

If you were to use the assignments and pracs used throughout the Software Engineering degree I completed (similar to a Computer Science degree) as a guide to what I would be spending my career doing, I’d spend 90% of my time developing console applications that read some input, do something, and produce some output. Sure this is the easiest way to learn about data structures, algorithms, and the theoretical side of computing, but I find myself with a gaping hole in my skill-set with respect user experience and design.

For now I’ll be hitting the books and trying to get myself up the curve, but at some point I may need to do some formal PD in this area.

More pressure, but little action

Yesterday’s coverage of the latest results from MykiLeaks caused another media stir, but little else. It seems TTA chief Bernie Carolan is reluctant to do much more than encourage users to check their statements, and to re-assure Melbourne’s PT users that the TTA ‘believes’ the error rate to be below 1%.

In April, when the first major coverage of MykiLeaks hit the papers, there were 200 odd statements, with one third reporting overcharges. A small sample size, combined with the argument that someone is more likely to submit their statement to MykiLeaks for analysis if they already suspect overcharging, meant that the TTA were able to dodge the issue with relative ease.

The latest figures – 15% in error from 2000 statements – in my opinion are far less easy to write off as a statistical error. Unlike the first media release, this time I’ve referenced specific examples of overcharging, including an incident where a user was charged $18 for a days tram travel. That’s about 3 times the correct fare.

So what now? Well, I don’t want to have to maintain MykiLeaks site forever, and more to the point, Melbourne’s PT users shouldn’t have to submit their personal data to some guy on the Internets that they don’t know. Here are some reasonable demands that I intend on (somehow) getting fulfilled:

  • Every myki card on the system needs to be audited BY KAMCO for overcharging, right back to the day it was issued.
  • Any overcharges found should be credited back to the accounts without request from the user.
  • Until there is sufficient evidence that the overcharging problem has been rectified, regular (weekly / monthly) audits of all accounts should occur, with overcharges credited back to the account.

I also take issue with the fact that myki statements do not show the user what actual fare [edit – i.e. 2hr / daily / zones] they have paid on a given day, but I’ll leave that fight for another day.