Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is rail transit system in the San Francisco CA (USA) Bay Area. BART recently introduced a wireless version of their online trip planner. Transit schedules and trip planners – like driving directions and city directories are ideal mobile applications. I think it would be absolutely wonderful if I could bring up a tool on my phone that would let me find the best way to get somewhere on transit particullarly in a city I wasn’t familiar with.
\nUnfortunately, mobile transit tools especially good ones are rare. London has a great WAP based trip planner<\/a>. For Palm and Windows PDA’s and Symbian Smartphones there is a very good native app called Metro<\/a><\/em> which covers over 300 systems worldwide.<\/p>\n
I was excited about the possibilities of BART’s planner. Unfortunately, although BART’s web site<\/a> says it’s for your “mobile phone or PDA”, BART’s effort seems to be designed for devices with a large touch screen rather than the typical phone. Why do I say this? Well there’s a 375X375 px System Map which is a bit too big for most phones. But that’s not the worst part. Take a look at the second image. That’s what displays on the phone after I’ve scrolled to and selected the “From:” dropdown. Doesn’t look too bad, all I need to do is scroll down and select the station I want – right? Not really, BART has 43 stations, so if I’m at the last one, West Oakland I have to click the “down” button 43 times on most phones. Compare with how London’s TFL site does it. I enter either the Postal Code or the first few letters of the station name and I’m presented with a short list of possible stations. Conventional wisdom about designing mobile pages says that forcing users to type letters and words on their phone keypad is bad, as a signifigant percentage of users simply won’t. But the solution BART used is far worse. An ideal design might be to have the use first pick the city or choose from a list of a-e, f-j and then present a much sorter list of only those stations meeting the initial criteria. Dropdown lists are also less usable on phones than a simple list of links – with numeric access keys if the device supports them.<\/p>\n
Content: Usability:
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Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is rail transit system in the San Francisco CA (USA) Bay Area. BART recently introduced a wireless version of their online trip planner. Transit schedules and trip planners – like driving directions and city directories are ideal mobile applications. I think it would be absolutely wonderful if I could bring up a tool on my phone that would let me find the best way to get somewhere on transit particullarly in a city I wasn’t … Continue reading