What is the issue here?
I think it could be way better if it was slightly reorganized so the instructions were clear and positioned near the point of interaction they were describing (“1. Enter plate number (or whatever) here. 2. Enter payment here. 3. Take ticket and place on dash.”)
I don’t claim to be the best at it but I design UIs pretty frequently and one thing I’ve learned is that nobody reads anything if it’s more than one or two words; they just start pressing buttons by intuition and proceed by trial and error, and there are a lot of buttons to get lost in here.
The screen is barely readable too.
I'm sure the software is equally terrible and slow as hell.
Also at the time the system was designed (possibly pre-smartphones), I remember lots of machines like it, incurring train ticket machines with touchscreen keyboards, had alphabetical keyboards. I suspect there was a recommendation that not everyone, such as very old people, would be familiar with QWERTY. I also suspect that in the intervening decade or so, it was realised that actually no-one can use a 2D alphabetical layout at all, because the alphabet is linear and presenting it a grid didn't work. So actually alphabetical is pretty bad for everyone. But it's also the lowest common denominator.
Sadly, once you've shipped a device like this, no one will pay you to go around and replace very expensive ruggedised keyboards just to make typing easier.
OLED isn't the only screen technology and it's not what would look best in this environment. The best would be eink which has higher contrast in the sun. Eink can also be put behind weather proofing and be fine. It also doesn't draw power at idle.
I wish I could work on fixing all of the IoT gear that governments install.
Plus the service fee for getting a service technician out to the machine (I imagine at least £100 a visit), plus the admin overhead of detecting failures and scheduling visits and lost downtime income would make that an extremely hard sell to a council. Hundreds of pounds per machine per year.
And then multiply by every other element that you skimp on, and the thing will be broken continuously after the first 6 months, while sapping thousands in parts and labour.
A few months/years down the line, even the sub-par talent working on it will probably realize how terrible their product is, but speaking up would be akin to admitting defeat (and might have career risks), so nobody says anything and congratulates themselves for having "delivered" the project.
When the end client receives the deliverable the same situation applies, it's too late to backpedal even though the product is shit, so they also keep quiet and pretend like it is fine.
The screen indeed looks like it'd be tricky and annoying to read.
Also, if you use the app, you don't need to use the machine although for some reason, we seem to have at least 10 different parking apps in the UK. Not sure who decides that we need another parking app.
So maybe Peugeot?
Even in places that only have numeric plates I assume they are not going to make a numbers-only version of the machine
Saw one recent that did license plate.