The paper intends to reduce the visual cognition errors of the elderly using the railway self-service ticket vending machine and optimize the design of the self-service ticketing interface. To sort out the types of visual cognition errors in the elderly and their corresponding error factors; Through recruiting 30 senior citizens to participate in the simulation experiment of the whole process of self-service ticket purchase, combined with the interview data after the experiment, to extract and classify the visual cognitive errors that may occur in the elderly ticket purchase; From the perspective of visual cognition, to explore the underlying causes of ticket purchase errors , and to analyze the design of the existing self-service ticketing interface that does not meet the characteristics of the visual cognitive processing of the elderly; An optimization strategy is proposed for the interface of railway self-service ticket vending machines to improve and evaluate the interface for aging. The research shows that in the process of visual cognition of the self-service ticketing interface, the elderly will miss and misunderstand the target information, fail to understand the semantics of the target information, and match the original cognitive experience due to attention failure, perceptual confusion and negligence. These problems are optimized by rationally organizing and strengthening information, strengthening the semantic understanding of target information, matching the cognitive experience of the elderly and increasing fault tolerance. The usability test results of the optimized interface show that it is an effective design method to reduce operation error and improve the satisfaction of the elderly from the perspective of visual cognition error.