Translink quietly testing iMOVE
Posted on July 4th, 2007 in links, rants, transportation, youtube |
I thought the age of stealing Apple’s acronyms has over. Boy was I wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if the terrible name was created by the same web firm that designed this ugly website. iMOVE is Translink’s attempt to bring together regional transportation information into one place for easy access.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it succeeds very well at all:
- The site is, as I said before, fuuuuuugly. This thing looks like it was designed in 1997 - yes folks, that is a decade ago now. I am pleasantly surprised they used Google Maps with the site (yay!), but it’s implementation is far short of even Google’s own offering, Google Transit (which would’ve been a far better use of money, IMO). The icons are ugly and bland, the multiple grey tabs on top of the map completely eschew any purpose for the coloured tabs, not to mention how many clicks one has to make to view info such as the traffic cameras. And again, why take up 1/3 of the page with the stupid logo and colourful tabs, when what I really want to see is (a much larger) map, real time accidents and traffic cameras.
- The information integration is not there. I assumed that, when I first read about this site, I would be able to plan a trip going from, say, Langley to Nanaimo. Far short of that, sadly. First off, you can’t actually plan a transit trip, you can only view the bus routes. Secondly, all that talk about integrating regional transportation options - it actually means a link to BC Ferries website. There is no info about VIA Rail, nor is Greyhound even mentioned on the site.
- Useful transit info is not there. Okay, so they have the bus routes and SkyTrain plotted on the map. Don’t get me started on why the bus routes were done with the Google lines, whereas the SkyTrain was plotted in some completely different way. Click on a SkyTrain station, you think they’d have multiple pictures, station address, connecting bus routes, maybe even the station layout. Nope, all they have is the name of the station! Bus routes don’t have any info about which stops have what services, let alone any stop info at all! Select two bus routes, and they won’t be indistinguishable from one another, because they are both in blue!
- Cycling info is cool, but sucks. First off, I barely understand the difference between an “Alternate Off-Street, Alternate On-Street, Designated Off-Street, Designated On-Street” bike path, and I doubt any member of the public will either. It does not tell me which SkyTrain stations have bike facilities either.
- This info doesn’t help anybody. It’s hard enough to get people to plan their trip ahead of time. I don’t think having this site will encourage very many more to use it. The fact of the matter is, real time traffic info is only useful on the road and there is no mobile version of the site!
It’s a huge disappointment and makes me want to make my own version of the site. Too bad I don’t know how to code. There was so much potential with the idea of having this great all-in-one resource. I’d like to know what web firm designed this ugly piece of crap, and how much they got paid to do it.
There is one good feature of the site, and that is the trip calculator at the top of the site. It figures out how much is will cost, based on the price of gas, to drive somewhere, in either a car, truck, SUV, etc. Very cool feature. It could be better though, if it did something like Google Driving Directions, and you were able to plot an actual location and destination, and then tap into those gas checking sites to get the last available price, based on the start location.
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6 Responses
That is, as your said, fugly. I mean it, looks like someone tried to do retro style but couldn’t help doing this of our current style. Unfortunately, the implementation is very similar to numerous government widgets I have seen… it’s almost like governments want bad design. Seriously, I like Google Transit’s implementation and just wish more countries would follow Japan… (full implementation!)
I got an invitation to test this out yesterday too. I have mixed feelings toward the site. It’s a huge improvement on the existing website, but I wish they would have used more of the Google Transit features.
iMove seems cluttered and as you’ve mentioned, you can’t actually plan trips with it. Maybe that will come. The current implementation is still beta. But this is a huge gaping hole.
The cycling maps are the most useful feature in my opinion. I do understand the difference between Alternate and Designated, On-Street and Off-Street routes. It’s the same designations that any of official cycling maps use (alternate routes are cycling friendly, but not actual signed routes). The cool part is that they display the trails using Google Maps and it shows cycling routes all over the Lower Mainland (not just Vancouver). Good luck trying to get that data anywhere else. Now if they could help me plan a commute using cycling routes and estimate the time, that would be amazing.
I am a programmer and I know how hard it is to create a powerful, yet simple, interface. I think they’ve done a decent job. They might have put too many features in though.
Yes, and what’s with the iMove / i-move.ca domain problem? It’s either goa hyphen or it doesn’t.
TTFN
Travis
@ Chris. It isn’t really that hard to do, is it? I mean, it’s basically just a mash up of content with Google Maps. The difficult part, I assume, short of integrating trip planners and such, would be to have all the transportation agencies export their data into an xml format to enable not only easy updating on the site, but also things like RSS feeds on the latest accidents.
I do agree about the cycling routes. They are nice to have in one place, and certainly an improvement over those slow, bloated PDFs the cities have. But still, they are just layers of lines on top of Google Maps. You think they could’ve implemented it better.
As a traffic reporter, I’m looking forward to see how accurate the traffic incident information is. Does anyone know who is supplying the traffic info? Commuters? Radio stations?
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[...] wrote a post about iMove a while back, when it was still in beta. I basically lambasted the whole product as a waste of [...]