> Yeah this info, very condensed, should just be on big signs at station. ”You can just tap your credit card and travel, no need to do anything else at all”.

This messaging is all over TfL stations and advertising. If you're stood at a London train or Underground stop for any length of time, you're likely to hear the overhead tannoy repeating a message about how convenient contactless cards are, and how they charge the same (cheapest) fare as the official Oyster system.

It's a testament to how hard telling people anything is, that having a popup on the ticket machine is still effective.

I’d interpret ”Constactless card” as some form of RF variant of a traditional ticket card. Not as a way of describing your regular visa/mastercard debit/credit cards. Is “contactless card” a normal way of describing a debit/credit card? Can’t any rf card be said to be contactless?

The big revolution elsewhere was the transition from RF based ticket cards to RF based regular credit/debit cards. They’re both “contactless” though but one is s a hassle.

Contactless is the normal word used in Britain for EMV NFC payments. It's also the word used by the EMV standard [1].

London had RF ticket cards (Oyster card) since 2003, EMV payments since 2012.

[1] https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/emv-contactless-chip/

I never heard the term EMV either and had to Google it now. I think my point is: for signs, use stupidly simple language, understandable by everyone. These signs are for tourists perhaps more than Londoners.

The constant reference to “Oyster cards” for 20 years without specifying that “yeah that’s codespeak for ticket” was a very similar UX failure. They should have called them the 3 seashells…

Everywhere seems to have a name for their equivalent of Oyster cards though. The bay area has Clipper cards, and the seattle area has Orca cards.

Conactless cards includes those (but your Orca card probably doesn't work in London...) and credit/debit cards, and your phone if that's how you roll.

Not every credit/debit card includes contactless yet, afaik, telling people they can just use their credit card when there's no way to swipe or insert is going to lead to confusion and delay at the entrance gates.

~Any credit or debit card issued in Western Europe in the last decade would be contactless.

Yeah I think if a sign says you can use your contactless credit card or “touch your credit card at the gate” or some language like that, then it should be clear enough.

With validity of credit cards being <5 years you’d think we are at 100% now having no magnetic strip. Perhaps cards issued in some countries do have magnetic strip (but hopefully 100% have contactless too)

The vast majority in the UK do, and that is why it works.

> the overhead tannoy

I had never heard the word tannoy. The Internet informed me about the British loudspeaker company Tannoy.

By the way, their Wikipedia article says their lawyers watch out for people using their trademark as a generic word and chase them down.

So is a lot of other messaging. An overwhelming amount for a lot of people.

The “see it say it sorted” is what usually sticks in my mind :)