And let the hating begin :P

I hate being so negative, but I’m a fan of Apple, of Nintendo, of Google - these amazing organizations that almost continuously release amazing products. So when TransLink brings out something, I expect and envision something great. Unfortunately, as I’m beginning to learn, I shouldn’t have my hopes up too high.

I wrote a post about iMove a while back, when it was still in beta. I basically lambasted the whole product as a waste of TransLink’s, and potential users’, time and money. Since then, a few things have happened.

  • TransLink surveyed the whole Online Advisory Panel, with 1144 respondents participating. I don’t think the response was what they were hoping for; I mean, just look how disappointing this first line of the email was: “In general, respondents told us we were headed in the right direction…” The Panel a liked few things: the concept of a one stop transportation shop, usage of Google Maps, and webcams. When those are the only three things people like about your product, I gotta say that sounds like quite a wreck.
  • After the survey, TransLink fixed three things: they increased the size of the map, tried to speed up the Google Map, and added mouse-over descriptive text for the icons. No, they didn’t really fix very much.
  • TransLink promised they would have these features in store by the winter: reducing redundancy of the tabs, moving the detailed info table from the bottom of the site to elsewhere, and creating a mobile version of the site. We’ve yet to see any of thee improvements.

And so, iMove was officially released. Not much has changed. This site has major, major problems right down to the core of the design of the site, and minimal tweaks are not going to fix it. TransLink should not have released iMove in it’s current state, and should’ve gone back to the drawing board. The design needs to completely eliminate redundancy, and focus on a balance between usability and information. iMove can’t be everything to everyone - and TransLink has realized this, promising not to add a trip planner into it, leaving that functionality for their official trip planner or Google Transit. In any case, to me, the major issue is the design. However, the development of a mobile site is also very essential, and something they are apparently working on.

What’s worse, iMove is now a live site. It should be providing the latest traffic information to it’s users. Then, why do I see notifications for things that happened in October or earlier? And I would bet that if anyone compared the notifications on iMove and the traffic radio reports, you would see nothing was updated on the site, making it completely useless. I’ve been following it throughout the day, and have not seen one new traffic alert. For a live site, this is unacceptable.

But, you want the icing on the cake? According to News1130, iMove has been in development for *five* years. Five years. For this piece of crap. Oh, but it gets better. The Backgrounder, provided to me by TransLink, said that the various levels of government have contributed a total of $1,080,900 to this project. TransLink paid $490,000 of the initial investment, and has also committed $210,000 for “content development, marketing and project management.”

Woah. Something is absolutely wrong here. Obviously, the government does not have any clue on how they should be interacting with the web and how much they should be paying for it. This is absolutely ridiculous and I’m completely appalled.

iMove is shit. Maybe Vancouver’s web geeks can fix it at TransitCamp.

Sphere: Related Content