Strategy:

It is an extreme case of design reduced to what is strictly essential; we have seen this in notebooks and other electronics already. Having a look at the features it includes, helps us picture the scene:

On the cheapest version the driver’s seat is the only seat which can be adjusted.

There is no power steering and various “luxuries”, such as air conditioning, fog lamps, front power windows or central locking are only available on pricier models. I don’t know about you, but I could do without  front power windows if that would mean reducing the price of the car. For us, the ones that see the car as a big tool that helps us get from A to B, there is a big difference in the value of real functionality, such as power steering, and commodities that allow you to get lazy such as central locking.

It is a nice example of targeted design: rather than competing directly with the next cheapest car, it aims to substitute scooters and small motorbikes, with a price of Rs. 100,000 (around $2000).

Safety on the road – the Nano has a point here. Image from Joe Athialy

To meet all economical and quality requirements a good bit of innovation has been required. It is estimated that at least 35 patents associated with the vehicle have been registered.

Environmental issues:

This is one of hottest aspects of the Nano; on the one hand it is a car and it pumps out twice the CO2 as a scooter. On the other hand it has a 4-stroke engine and a crude catalytic converter which appears to reduce most pollutants by about 80 percent and which scooters lack of.

It also meets Euro-IV and Bharat Stage-III compliant, European emissions standards.

From my point of view, the problem here is not the Nano. Of course it will have a terrible effect on the already highly polluted cities in India, when the 50 million orders already placed for the car are delivered. But this is just the consequence of a barely existing public transport system in cities.

Now 50 million can… Image from Jaaziel

Indian cities are extensive and saturated with traffic, and on top of it most of the families can’t afford their own vehicle. This is cry for a well planed and far reaching public transport. If there are no measures taking in this direction, India will probably soon assume the car centred transport system, similar to the US, and then it will be really difficult to change things.

The Problem to Solve

Our agency is based in Munich, a city with a huge public transport network that takes people everywhere. The problem is that as the travelers get more options the network becomes more complex. Then, is very difficult for people to plan a journey without a computer with access to the online route planning system.

There are several services to check this information through a mobile phone but none takes advantage of the latest technology, like GPS.

The Solution

In the following video you can see a fast introduction to our design.

We have been asking users of public transportation about the places they usually go. The answer was that most of them are regularly going to the same places, like work, gym and favorite cafeterias or bars.

So we decided to design an interface as simple as possible that makes the journey planning really fast, wherever the user is but going to those "standard" places. We decided to design our first solution for the iPhone as we realized that tapping on the destination would be the fastest way to do it. 

The Interface

The fromhere interface is clean, it loads fast and eliminates any distraction other applications could have. For us, designing an interface that is fast and easy to use was our main goal. 

The Technology

Thanks to GPS the telephone knows where the user is located. The application then connects to the server to translate coordinates to a real address, such as "Duesseldorfer Strasse 11, Munich".

In the next step the application requests the journey plan between departure and destination to the servers.

Contact Us

Please contact us if you need farther details about the application.

The official fromhere product information website is here: http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere 

Creative Commons

You can use the contents of this article and video under Creative Commons Attributions License 3.0. Just link to http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere

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

"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.

The beginning is pretty similar on both sites, you will have to enter departure and destination airports and dates. Then you get to the flight selection.

British Airways
The BA site will display available flight dates and prices in two tables, one above the other. This approach is fine, but in my opinion the tables are two big and contain two little information, the comparison between them is a little bit difficult.

Really bad 1: when you choose another flight, a message with a funny animation will be displayed informing that the price will be updated, but after waiting a while nothing changes… What is this?!

Really bad 2: There is a link to a Currency Calculator. This is not going to change the site’s currency, but it will pop up another window with a currency calculator. So the user has to do this every time she wants to see the prices in another currency different from GB Pounds.

Lufthansa
I could not hide my happiness when I saw the design presented by Lufthansa for its booking system, not even Expedia has something like this. The site displays a table combining the departure and return flight dates where the desired flight is marked. Changing selection is fast and easy. It is also very nice from Lufthansa to mark in yellow the lowest prices. Fantastic.

Click to enlarge

Conclusion
I would not say that the British Airways site is bad, but Lufthansa found a much better design for its online booking service.

Unfortunately, MVG took a completely different approach while designing its ticket machines. Just as you can imagine it in your worst nightmares, the machine is full of numbers, zones, buttons, a small screen, etc., etc…

Lets have a closer look…
Imagine that you have the bad-luck of having to buy a ticket with this machine, where would you look at first? The screen is too far from the buttons and there are two different groups of buttons labeled with numbers (numbers 1 to 4 appear twice). It’s nice that you can select 6 different languages, but zone information and almost all button labels are only in German.

Here you have 28 buttons! You get them in orange, blue, yellow, red, green, with and without stripes. They did one good thing putting a sticker indicating the buttons to buy tickets for tourist, good point.

This is the most crazy part of this devilish machine, checking which zone ticket you should buy could be a whole mission. Please don’t ask me to tell you how this works, nobody knows.

.
Solution
Why don’t we reduce all this mess to the most simple and obvious solution? The machine should know where is located, so the only thing to do would be to push the destination station on the map! I want to go form here to there, that’s it!

I have to say that I totally love the Munich public transport, it’s just fantastic, but the price system and the ticket machines are horrible. There is something to improve there…

The German Trains (Deutsche Bahn) is looking for test users for a new system that will allow users to travel without a paper ticket. The idea is really cool (although is neither revolutionary nor new, people have been using this system in Japan for some time).

How it will work?
Pass your mobile phone through “Touchpoints” before taking the train, pass it again when your are at your destination and get the invoice later. The system will recognize your mobile thanks to a chip your telephone has (or will have).

Picture from Die Bahn AG

Touch and Trick?
I wonder if it would be possible to check prices before traveling. What if the price changes? What if I want to use a regional ticket? (those tickets with discount). Now I can buy a ticket to go to the Alps, come back to Munich and use the same ticket for the city transport. Would that be possible? Will the system choose the cheapest option for me? mmm…

Although I have my doubts about this system I think it might be worth to have a try. And if it works fine it could promote the use of mobile applications, yeah! I would love to try it but unfortunately is available only in north Germany… shame…

More info: http://www.touchandtravel.de