Bright Ideas: Verrus Pay by Phone logic

Recently I’ve had several friends get parking tickets for parking at a meter space and using the “Pay by Phone” feature offered by Verrus (ironically enough, a local Vancouver firm.)

The service works great, most of the time, you park at a meter, you call a phone, punch in the meter space and how long you want to park for and you’re done. It even sends you a reminder when your parking is set to expire so you can add more time remotely without going back to the meter.

One major problem, if you drive multiple cars and have them associated with your cell phone number, the system will default to your last chosen car – so if you’re driving your other car and in a rush and hit pay and go the system will indicate to the parking enforcement officer that you have not paid.

For a service that advertises itself as being about speed (dial one number and go) this doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Nor does it make sense from a logic point of view. All they need to know is that parking space X has been paid for. You can only get 1 car in a parking spot, so it will be one of the license plates associated with the account. Get rid of the “specific license plate” selection when paying for parking and by default accept any license plate on the account in the spot and all is good.

It saves a tonne of angry customers who knew they paid for parking but got a ticket anyways and makes people want to use, not hate the service.

Just a bright idea…

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This entry was posted on July 14th, 2010 and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.