Design vs Art Blog

Google public transportation directions is a great tool. With it you can easily know how to get to an specific place using the best combination of buses, trains and other kinds of public transportation. This could be a great success in Europe, where people are used to go everywhere by public transportation.

The Power of Design

This kind of websites already exist in Europe but it is usually offered by local companies, like the city-specific Transport for London website. Unfortunately, most of these were not very successful adapting for the web great design developed previously for paper. Last weekend I stopped by the Munich central station to get a paper timetable, old style but easy to understand, even if you don’t speak German language. This is the German Trains timetable for the Berlin - Munich connection:

The Copenhagen city transport website has a less lucky approach, as you can see in the picture below, reading is not that easy. (I use Copenhagen as an example but this is actually happening in several European cities like Munich, London and others).

The Google Design

The Google Maps approach is by far the best I have found. It is clear, fast and has a printer friendly version. It is also highly interactive, something that others don’t have: e.g. the Munich website displays maps only in PDF format (horrible.)

If you are not familiar with the Google public transportation service, have a look at the following video for a quick introduction. 

Some Problems

Although I love the public transit directions on Google Maps I have some worries:

1. Every time I use Google Maps a new button is placed on the map,

2. Why can I edit origin and destination from several places?

3. Some little things (like the bar at the top of the page) make me think that the whole thing could soon become cluttered. 

More Info

If you are interested on maps and timetable designs I recommend Edward Tufte’s book, "Envisioning Information" for a great inside on the topic.

Tufte’s Website

Popularity: 28% [?]

Email notifications are an important part of a website, affecting usability and the whole user experience. They should be clear, short and shouldn’t look like spam.

"A better approach would be to put the important information on top…"

Emails are part of the service and users use them for later reference. One example is the messages sent by online ticket reservation systems.

Lufthansa, the airline, sends confirmation emails that are almost worthless, just because a little detail. The message itself, the characters on it, doesn’t deliver important information for the user. On the other side, the important information is on a PDF document that can not be scanned by most email clients.

That means that emails will be very difficult to find once they are archived. The email subject doesn’t help either. A better approach would be to put the important information on top of the email body and subject! See how other airline is doing it better, read the article here.

Popularity: 14% [?]