There are two separate areas - the foyer and the platform.
For the foyer, I'd like to see major stations have screens showing the next fast (i.e. not overtaken) train to the three/five biggest "destinations".
For example, at Sheffield, I'd like screens showing the next train for some of Leeds/ Barnsley/ Doncaster/ Meadowhall/ Chesterfield plus London - so that a lot of passengers would know which screen to look at (instead of casting their eyes down several trains that are heading in other directions)
This is partly because a significant number of passengers are heading to a small number of other stations, but partly because of the confusion between all of the various routes to a certain place (e.g. Sheffield to Leeds has five trains per hour but the majority of these are overtaken en-route)
Some large stations have a frequent service to a place that lots of passengers want to travel to, but passengers have to read through a lot of far flung destinations to work out where the next one is (using Sheffield as an example, there are generally six trains per hour to Chesterfield but you have to remember that the destination could be "Norwich"/ Nottingham"/ "London"/ "Southampton"/ "Reading" or "Plymouth" (plus various services a day that terminate at Birmingham/ Penzance/ Derby etc) - as you scan through the list trying to find the next one that stops at Chesterfield you could easily miss one (or accidentally head for one of the XC ones that doesn't actually stop there - most of the Thames Valley ones skip Chesterfield - so seeing an XC train for Birmingham doesn't guarantee anything).
I don't know whether having "black on orange" (rather than "orange on black") approach for some flagship services would help? As a rule of thumb, there are probably going to be a lot more people waiting for a service operated by an HST than waiting for a service operated by a Sprinter, so maybe there should be more prominence given to these services?
re the platform side of things, as I've said on other threads, I'd like to see much better information at platforms (which end of the train will have First Class, where Coach A/ Coach J are, ideally where the doors will open) so that passengers know where to stand before the train arrives - but this is probably a bit too much "blue sky", and it'd be a lot easier to deal with the "foyer" section (when talking about departure boards) - IMHO there's a big difference between the first impression that you get when you arrive at a station (foyer) and the information that you get when waiting at your platform, anticipating the train, wondering where to stand, anxiously standing in a scrum of people in the middle of the platform before you start dashing along to one end of the train as you see it arriving... this would be a much harder problem to solve.
