BART, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system
I had trouble with the BART (San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit) mobile phone user interface for checking out schedules, so I sent them the following email.
The improvements are just good old-fashioned information design and matching the solution to the situation. I thought I’d share it here since it shows a bit of design thinking.
May I make a couple of suggestions as a product design consultant about improving to the usefulness and usability of the QuickPlanner?
This goes for both the web and mobile versions of the QuickPlanner.
Have a notion of “today” and let the user bookmark routes results page. For example a common route I take is from 24th & Mission to Lake Merrit. 80% of the time I am planning this for today. But every time I want to check the BART schedule I have to interact with the pop-ups. This is cumbersome and slow, especially on a mobile phone.
Here are details.
- On the QuickPlanner form page, provide a radio choice for “today” vs. “another day”.
- Default the choice to “today”. (On the regular web version of the QuickPlanner you could hide or disable the date & time controls until the user chooses “Another day”)
- When “today” is selected, on the results page show all the remaining trains for that route today, no matter what the date is.This page is bookmarkable and always brings up the schedule for the rest of today, no matter what day it is. Most of the time this is all the user will ever need.This would greatly reduces the amount of steps needed. The user no longer has to operate two long drop-downs, doesn’t have to review the date and time and press submit.
- On the results page, make it easy to skim the results by boldfacing key information and factoring out redundant information.
- For a direct journey with no transfers the results would reflect today’s date, the start and destination stations just once, at the top of the results page (rather than with each hit) and the fee.- To make it easier for the user to zero in on the key information, make the operative information boldface Each result might start with the boldface header: “Depart 11:19 am Arrive 11:40 am”. Under that are the details of the journey and whether “Bikes are allowed” or “Bikes NOT allowed” (to make it stand out a bit more, but not too much).
- For journeys involving transfers, the cyclist only needs to know once whether the entire journey allows bikes. (We save clutter and reduce errors by saying it once for the journey and not for each train.)
- At the bottom of the results page, put a note in suggesting: “We suggest you bookmark this page for faster access”. This line would only makes sense when the user has chosen “today” since specific dates would not be very useful to bookmark.
- The notion of “today” would be common-sense enough to go over midnight barriers. If it’s 11:30 pm, the user wants to see trains past midnight, not strictly today.
- Rather than paging after a handful of results. I suggest erring on the side of longer pages with more results. It’s slow to initiate and transfer data on a mobile phone; faster to just get it in one fell swoop and scroll through a longer listing.
- An instant bookmark to today’s schedule is handy, but sometimes the user does need to look ahead. At the top of the results page next to the date there is a “change” link. This goes to the QuickPlanner page. The start and end stations are pre-set, saving the user the chore.
Please compare this before and after mock-up of an itinerary involving a transfer:
Before: http://tinyurl.com/2upzjg
After: http://tinyurl.com/2pwrxo
You can try these URLs on a mobile phone.Hopefully this would not be too difficult a change. Please let me know if I can help further.
Thanks and best regards,
Philip Haine
Obvious Design
phaine@obviousdesign.com
Here is roughly what the before and after look like:
Before and after of BART QuickPlanner search results page
To get a more accurate picture of the differences, browse the before and after links above on a mobile phone.
Hopefully BART can implement bookmarkability and these improvements to the information design. I’ll let you know what they say…
