Tag Archive for 'Usability'

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Public transport directions

Published on January 3, 2007 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Yesterday the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) launched Scotty, a new public transport routing application. It covers Austrian city transport systems, bus lines, inland waterway transport and ferries, European railways and most of swiss bus transport. Until the UEFA EURO 2008 in Austria and Switzerland it’ll include 100% of Swiss and Austrian public transport (Graz and bus lines in Tyrol still need to be added).

The database works pretty impressive: you enter start and end address, Scotty returns the closest public transport stations (including walking distance) and finds the fastest route through all possible public transport systems (including public and private busses, railways, subways, trams, ferries, etc.). I think it’s pretty impressive to combine all that information and data sources from various operators and companies into one single application. That’s probably the most difficult part.

On the output side you get textual information as list where to go and where and when to change the train, bus, etc. Additionally you can open an overview map of your entire route or some detailed maps of station surroundings.

Now here is still some room for improvements on usability and mapping features. In times of AJAX, tiling or vector graphics driven web mapping I would expect a user-friendlier map.

Besides and considering Scotty to support and guide a huge amount of visitors in 2008 some more innovative features would be useful too.

Like reverse geocoding and trigger routing directly in the map for instance: I bet the chance that a visitor can pinpoint his hotel and the places to visit is higher than he is able to spell the german address correctly. Similar to the routing solution on Live Local, which is very well done btw.

Click rebels

Published on January 3, 2007 in Geekery and Random Box. Closed Tags: , , .

Click surveyNext time whenever I think I know exactly where users look and click on a website, I’ll do that click survey again.

Not very scientific, though, it gives some interesting patterns. Considering most people knew they are doing a test and probably tried rebelliously to avoid hitting popular spots, the symmetry of the results is fascinating.

Especially on the last image: the agglomeration line of clicks fits very well between the existing two lines and lies pretty much in the middle of them.

Google Textual Maps UI

Published on December 27, 2006 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Web accessibility is a big issue for public authorities’ IT services. Since eEurope 2002 every new developed web content must claim conformance to Conformance Level A, which means quite a challenge for public webmapping services.

Now Google has added text output to Google Maps too: depending on your search and how much textual information is available in your results, the map is becoming smaller in favor of more textual information. Searching for a place won’t give you any text information at all (how would you seriously describe the result of a place search?), while searching for directions results in 100% speech-friendly textual routing information. (via Official Google Blog)

Magic iPhone

Published on December 15, 2006 in Geekery and Random Box. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Just impressing how a one-liner manages going up on digg. No need for reporting about uninteresting details like features or something. Magic iPhone markets itself.

Sure, there is a good chance that it’ll come nicely designed, probably having an interesting usability too. But still, it’ll be a phone.

What do people expect of wonderPhone?

What would I expect of a new phone?

Actually I would like to see more or less the same features my phone already has (how un-fancy and boring!), but easier accessible by an improved user interface and usability:

  • all my contacts and friends with every contact detail, quickly search able
  • calendar, with better editing features
  • messaging – email, sms, im, blog – with improved writing features, I don’t like writing messages on the phone at all
  • a good camera and display with easy upload – flickr, blogging, etc. – features
  • request: gps enabled with routing and other location based services
  • request: music, replacing my iPod nano by a phone would be great
  • request: wifi enabled, would like to use VOIP and faster web access
  • constraint: size and battery life must remain at least the same.

There is probably some room left for improvements in the mobile phone business. But I heavily doubt it’ll be a revolutionary new Apple gadget. Well, lets see what comes out of Apple’s pipe (if there is something in…).

Just my 2 cents on the iPhone hype.

Quick and dirty SVG

Published on December 11, 2006 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , .

What I certainly do love about SVG is the fact that you can put nice looking interactive maps in a very simple and quick way together.

Today I wrote this small SVG map module (in German language and just a small part of an information system) and set it on top of a database containing various regional indicators. Main purpose of the database is to arrange user-defined indicators to customized tables together. The map is kind of a little bonus addition and should help to get a better picture about spatial distribution of certain indicators.

But the point is that this can be done in a day without the need of setting up and configuring a mapserver or web-GIS. Developing 2 or 3 days longer there even would be some more layers, features, colors, etc. and perhaps a cleaner coding style.

Especially when it comes to thematic maps, SVG is IMHO the best choice. Whenever you want to change some thresholds in your legend, or load some new statistical data into your existing regional units, a mapserver has to refresh the whole image. It’s pretty annoying compared to SVG which lets you simply load or reclassify data on-the-fly without the need of reloading any element of the user interface – AJAX, to name a buzzword.

Of course, since most of the work is done on the client-side, map performance is limited there and not on the server-side. But if you look at office machines running at 3GHz, this shouldn’t cause too much headache.

However, SVG enables simple and straight interfaces. Many of our clients get confused by most mapserver interfaces and highly appreciate those simple systems. That’s why we were asked for an easy solution this time. Just to quickly view some regional indicators on the map, without any fancy features.

Overlooked Google Reader feature?

Published on November 29, 2006 in Geekery. Closed Tags: , .

Since there is no announcement I guess I must have overlooked this Google Reader feature. In Google Reader you can categorize your subscriptions by assigning them to different “folders” (btw, why not tags or categories, why folders? this is so Web 1.0!). To do so you have to go to “manage subscriptions” and tag each of your subscribed feeds.

Right after adding a new feed there was no way (at least I didn’t see it) to assign the new feed directly to folders. You always had to leave the feed display, go to “manage subscriptions”, then remember the name of the newly added feed and assign it to folders.

This morning, after adding a new feed to my Reader, I got this option above the feed display:

Google Reader - Add to folder...

Better.

One click too much

Published on November 11, 2006 in Geekery and Geomensch. View Comments Tags: , , , .

As much as I appreciate the recently updated European roads in Yahoo! maps, and therefore also in the Flickr map, I hardly use the built-in geotagging feature of Flickr.

If you want to geotag an entire photo set it works great. Once you’ve opened up the map organizer you can easily drag & drop all photos onto the map. But if you upload just a single photo and want to geotag it, the loc.alize bookmarklet gets the job easier and faster done.

In Flickr you need to go through Organize > wait > Map > wait > select photo > drag to location. It’s one click too much and therefore takes too long. The usability of loc.alize is much more convenient, it allows you to access the map and assign the location directly in the photo page: loc.alize > wait > select location > save.

Considering the amount of geotagged photos in Flickr I’m maybe wrong and most user’s are happily geotagging with the help of Flickr’s map. On the other hand you read the default loc.alize link “See where this picture was taken.” quite a lot under Flickr photos…

Photos and usability

Published on November 5, 2006 in Geekery and Random Box. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

remotesUsually, when it comes to usability and interface design, Apple enjoys a quite good reputation. Especially the smart and simple iPod design is just brilliant, close to the legendary one-button-system.

This week Apple updated Aperture, added, finally, support for my new camera and made a trial version available. So I got a copy and tried Aperture. Mainly because I wanted to compare it to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is available as public beta.

First off, I’m no professional photographer, just an amateur who is looking for a tool to manage his RAW images in the way iPhoto handles snapshots. I’m not going with iPhoto because it doesn’t take advantage of the RAW format, it converts and copies every RAW picture to another compressed image format. What I’m looking for is probably somewhere in between iPhoto and Lightroom/Aperture.

However, I tried Aperture, imported most of my RAW images and began adjusting, ordering, etc. Without the intention to slug anyone here, but Aperture gave me one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever had. We just didn’t like each other. I wasn’t able to find the most simple things like editing metadata or copy color adjustments from one picture to another (can I?) and Aperture gave me no hint where to look for it either.

Maybe Aperture is just not built for me and my MacBook in matters of usability, screen size and speed.

On the other hand, I had no trouble understanding the interface and concept of Lightroom. In my opinion it’s very clear, more intuitive, a lot snappier and runs overall with a better performance on my MacBook than Aperture.

Both applications seem to do their job well, just in different ways. For amateur photographers like me both products probably mean a feature overkill. If iPhoto would’ve a better RAW handling and slightly better color adjustment features, I would just stick with it.

Everybody has got a map

Published on October 28, 2006 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , .

The awareness of geographic information has surely increased recently. Easy accessible mapping APIs made embedding maps on any kind of website a common sport these days. Good, geographic information is essential and should easily be available for everybody.

Though on some sites I can’t help but get the impression that a map is just there because some webmaster may thought “Hey, everybody has a Google Map, we need one too!”.

Besides being a good example of how the result may look like when the screen designer is missing, I wonder why they put the search box above the little Google Map. What would you as user expect of a map within the Austria section of an Austrian newspaper’s web portal? An Austria related map, right? Meaning that I can search there for Austrian addresses, places and maybe routing or some other type of geographic information.

I can’t.

Since Google isn’t offering any of this information for Austria, this map search is, from my point of view, completely useless and misleading. Unless you know the trick of putting “, Austria” at the end of every search term you’ll only be able to find “Wien” or “Vienna” in the map (the Austrian capital, btw).

Basically a map is a fairly good method to support and illustrate articles on a news portal. But please dear webmaster, before doing so, define the aim and purpose of the shown geographic information.

Morning coffee

Published on October 27, 2006 in Geekery. Closed Tags: , , , .

BeatnikPad offers now optimized Firefox 2 builds for Macs again, which bring an overall better performance on Mac OS X. If you’re unhappy with the icon and name “BonEcho” you can simply change and rename them in the finder and info-window. To get the browser labeled as Firefox in the menu bar too, you’ll want to edit Firefox.app -> right-click “Show Package Contents” -> Contents -> Resources -> en.lproj -> InfoPlist.strings and rename “BonEcho” there to “Firefox” too.

At the same site I came over a nice Firefox extension: Fission, puts the page loading progress into the address bar as known from Safari. From a usability point of view I think it’s much better than in the status bar. The eye can stay at the upper screen area and don’t has to jump around to see whether a page is completely loaded or not.

I’ve never seen the small animated arrows on Google Maps before when you zoom in or out using a scroll wheel. A good method to ease orientation while fast zooming on maps.