Sarah Brown wrote:

I got off the train, touched out, and wandered round the foyer area
looking for a ticket machine.

Problem one. Depending on how you look it at, Stratford either has a
concorse with a railway line in the middle or an interchange concourse that
you arrived in. The problem is no-one cares to make this clear to the
passenger who doesn't know the station or what to do.

I couldn't find one, so went to look for
details of when my train was. The information provided there needs a
bit of detective work to put together - one set of boards provides the
times, but not the ultimate destination, so you can't just find your
train from the departure screens if, like me, you have no idea where
it's terminating. A second poster, elsewhere in the station, provides
a list of platform numbers for various destinations.

Yes Stratford is dire for this sort of thing. A worse problem is that on
platform 8, the eastbound metro service, there are no indicators for a large
chunk at the east end of the platform, so you're reliant on either
announcements or walking down the platform to find it which stations peak
hour trains stop at (and that's when the platform is crowded beyond belief).
A favourite of the announcers is to override the destination announcement
with a generic "don't leave luggage" one because it's clearly not important
to tell people where the train is going.

I tell her I've already touched out, and she asks where I came from,
and I tell her. She then says I have to touch out again, "to end my
journey", and buy a ticket.

Another problem is that a lot of TfL staff don't seem to know how to
correctly use Oyster at complicated stations like Stratford. There are
similar problems with the DLR - I've never been sure if one has to touch in
twice if starting at Stratford, or how to correctly change from a ticketed
mainline service to the DLR on Oyster. "Always touch in, always touch out"
becomes a meaningless mantra if you don't know which is which.