When Transport for London relaunched their site last month I’ll admit I didn’t like it. It made me change the way I was used to doing things. But now that I’ve had a chance to use it and look at it more closely I’ve come to appreciate that it’s a huge improvement over the old site. They’ve put a lot of thought into usability & accessibility and they use semantic html & css throughout (albeit with a smattering of minor validation errors).
So well done. Shame the journey planner is still useless!
This entry was posted by Tamlyn Rhodes on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is tagged with Usability and is posted in the category Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I'm intrigued that you think the journey planner's useless - as someone who lives in London and can spend up to 20 hours a week commuting, I find it very handy... you're not trying to use it do journey plans for Sheffield, are you? 
OK useless is perhaps too strong a word. But you certainly can't trust the route planning algorithm. It regularly tells me to get two buses, a train and another bus on routes where a single bus would be easier, shorter, quicker and cheaper. It send you all over the place for no apparent reason and often suggests routes that make very little sense.
The implementation, on the other hand is top notch. Detailed maps of start point, end point and any changes. Information about disruptions. Suggestions to walk certain bits when it's quicker. And my favourite feature: when you ask to see later times, it leaves the current times on display and *adds* the later times to the end of the list! I wish thetrainline.com would so that. But that's another story for another day...
And here's another one.
The number 26 bus goes from from hackney to waterloo. I just wanted to know how long it takes so I put it into the journey planner. It offered me all kinds of other routes but not that one (even when I selected 'least changes' rather than 'least time'). I retried my search with 'well street' and 'waterloo bridge' (because, fortunately I know the exact route of the bus) it offered me a route with a bus, another bus, then a tube, another tube and finally another bus! Four changes! even when I had specified the exact name of the bus stop and there is a bus that goes between them (and no, there aren't any road works, the 26 is running today).
THAT'S why i hate the journey planner.
And as if that wasn't crazy enough: i just checked what the 4 change route it offered me actually was and the first part involves taking the 26! then another bus and two tubes then get out at waterloo and take another 26 *in the other direction*. Whereas staying on the first 26 would get you there 10 minutes quicker. Aaaasrrgh!
OK, rant over, I promise to shut up now.
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