Monday, December 21, 2009
Metro.net Before
Metro.net After (Beta Redesign)
I’ve been really interested in the new beta redesign for LA’s transit system, metro.net. I never thought the design was terrible, but it did take me some time to find what I was looking for before I had it memorized. The new design is seems pretty minor, but there are some important differences.
- All the random tidbits toward the bottom of the page to find frequently needed content (i.e. Maps, timetables, rider info, etc.) are not longer graphically presented. Instead, the top tabs have a nice little menu system with each section’s contents broken down.
- Service updates now live on the homepage, presenting which lines are currently affected. Before, there was a link which then would take you to a listing of service updates. Less clicks and also, more urgency attached to the alerts.
- A typographic improvement to the Trip Planner.
- Popular pages listing, which is useful for riders who use the site for specific information again and again.
- Nifty icons for E-mail Alerts, the RSS feed, and Twitter at the upper-right hand corner. I think some of the other social media icons could have gone there as well.
- A news section (”The Source” blog) with post titles and summaries on the lower half of the page. The JavaScript tabbed content system (one of my favorite scripts for displaying large amounts of content) here is used throughout the site for other pages.
- Awesome illustrations are used throughout the site, and very strategically on the Projects & Programs pages to draw interest to the projects and programs that the public may not know about.
- Neat semi-new areas (some existed before, but were not easy to find unless you were looking for them) like the photo gallery.
In other words, I very much approve. One of my favorite features is the Developer website. I think it’s part of a general movement by the different branches of government, led by the awesome Obama web team, to embrace web accessibility and social media (will be doing a piece on the awesome resource Usability.gov soon, though I’m not a huge fan of the type treatment).
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