Andrea Schneider
Swiss Federal Railways
Andrea Schneider is a User Experience Architect at the Swiss Federal Railways and PhD candidate at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She holds a Master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology and is currently writing a dissertation on safety in the mobility context from a human factors perspective. Her interest lies in investigating innovative methodological approaches to investigate human factors in mobility contexts. Due to her work as a User Experience Architect, she follows a user-centered mind set.
Monthly conducted customer surveys by the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) show that security and safety perception are important predictors of customer satisfaction. Therefore, the aim is to build an environment that is perceived as safe but still indicates the necessity of reasonable behavior according to the given safety rules. Thus, research questions about 1) how customers perceive their own safety and which factors influence their safety perception and behavior, and 2) how the existing safety measures in train stations are perceived, are addressed. Safety perception is difficult to assess with subjective measurements only (e.g. questionnaires) due to the limitations that subjective measurements hold (Mayer, 2009; Raithel, 2008; Wohlrab, 2009). Therefore, a multi-method approach (Schlüter, Nicklas, & Winzer, 2016) should be further investigated. Following a user-centered design mind set (Abras, Maloney-Krichmar, & Preece, 2004; Schneider, Schmidt, Vollenwyder, & Siegenthaler, 2016) research results will be used to develop preventive measures by a cross divisional team (Customer Experience Management, Division of Infrastructure, and User Experience Team) (Thurau, van den Heuvel, Ofwegen, Keusen, & Hoognedoom, in preparation).
Goal of study one was to investigate how customers perceive their safety on platforms, which factors influence their safety perception and which factors lead to stepping into the danger zone. An observation and a survey were conducted on five train station platforms in five different train stations. During the observation, two different survey links were handed out – one link for passengers which were observed stepping into the danger zone (group A), and one link for passengers which were not directly observed overstepping the safety line (group B). 429 Passengers (32 group A, 307 group B; 90 not classified answers) filled out the survey. First analysis show that one third of group A was not aware of their action, answering the question “were there already situations in which you had to overstep the safety line (despite when entering or leaving the train)” with no. Participants from group A which stated that they already overstepped the safety line (n = 21), most frequently named bypassing a great number of people on the platform as a reason for overstepping the safety line. Only 6.9% named inattentiveness in the survey as a reason for overstepping the safety line. In contrast, the observation showed that in addition to bypassing other passengers, inattentiveness (talking to another person or on the cell phone, or wearing headphones) was the main reason for passengers overstepping the safety line. The findings show that the conducted survey holds limitations when asking about behavior because we are not always aware of our actions.
Furthermore, survey participants felt significant safer in shops at the train station, the train or at other places at the train station compared to the platform or underground. 60% named a crowded platform or drive-through trains as reason for feeling unsafe. Differences in safety perception at the different train stations can be explained with differences in passenger density. The perceived people density reported in the survey correlated with the perceived safety on the platform.
