Sometimes too much communication is no communication.
This morning on the tube we had a particularly talkative driver, She must have felt lonely shut in her cab, as at each stop we had a rendition on how “leaning on the doors can cause delays”, to “be careful when leaving the train as the platforms were congested” and “to remember to take all of our belongings with us”. Pretty obvious stuff really and generally you find that people will or will not do these things whether you tell them at every station or not.
A good example of this is at a couple of stations on the Northern line, the first or last doors don’t open due to the platforms being too short (or is it that the trains are too long?). An automated voice politely tells passengers in these carriages to “move to the front or rear of the train”, still it is very rare to see anyone proactively do so, instead panicking to get off the train when they realise the doors they have walked to aren’t opening, and usually bruising other people on their way.
The overuse of the automatic messaging and driver PA system o the tube has led to passengers not taking any notice and thus missing the important information. This over-communicating perhaps more infamously occurs in instruction manuals. I was given a coffee maker as a gift this Christmas and as I had never owned one I decided to read the manual in the hopes of getting the gist of what to do. Unfortunately while the instructions were generally clear there was a tendency to explain overly obvious steps like “switch on the wall socket if it has a switch”, whilst missing more important things like where is the reservoir in which to pour the water. Hmm. After a few hours I finally managed to make myself a cup of coffee Woohoo. Funnily enough, now I know how to use the machine, it is actually very simple.
So I guess the moral of these two tales is,
keep it simple, informative and accurate. Make the important information stand out and relegate detailing to a lesser level.
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