Elisio...

A recently-spotted departures board at LGW says "Depart..." instead of "Departures", and things like 14..." and "15..." instead of the times:

At least it didn't crash.  But this is a design failure for a departures board.  The designer should have designed it so that the required information fit in the space.

But there wasn't a thoughtful designer, or possibly a designer at all.  Instead, there were geektards, running rampant.  And geektards love to solve the general problem.  So here, a whole team congratulates themselves on the clever way they generalised a thing of "if there isn't enough space, truncate the text, and put in an elipsis", and the way they did this is a great piece of abstraction, possibly even a "design pattern", and so on.  Meanwhile, people can't see what time their flight departs, or even the word "Departures" in full, and any normal person can see that as a departures board, this is not fit for purpose.

There's a similar problem on car displays.  You can have a display of some megapixels, with most of the area blank space, and in a tiny area of that, the song title is displayed as "Beetho...".  Again, with reasonable design, the full title of the piece would be displayable for 99% of tracks.

Back to airport departures boards, there is a habit of displaying several pages of information using one screen, and paging through on a timer.  So for someone to read off the information they need, they have to stand there, looking at it, waiting for it to page.  There's no proper reason for this.  Either add multiple screens, or make better use of the one screen.  For example: imminent flights at the top in normal size, then smaller text and summary info for the many flights that don't even have gates announced yet.

Here's an example of it done right, at Zurich:

There are three boards, but the important point is that none of them are paging.  The displays remain constant, except to make incremental changes as the situation progresses.