crazed monkey

On Monday individuals from the four websites who collected TTC website suggestions from the Toronto community through their weblogs released their findings to the TTC and the general public. They did so in the worst way possible; using a spreadsheet. These are four fairly successful websites, all running popular weblogs and collecting their suggestions from local web users in their comments sections, also on the web. Wouldn’t it have made sense to also release their findings on, oh I don’t know, a web page? Apparently that would have made way too much sense.

Let’s ignore that not everyone has Microsoft Excel on their machines. (I don’t and instead had to wait for that ugly behemoth, NeoOffice, to sputter to life and display the data.) Let’s also ignore that if a spreadsheet was the answer, it could have been released in CSV format. Instead, let’s look at the data. (Those of you without Microsoft Excel will have to follow along using the image below.)

The open letter to Adam Giambrone describes the spreadsheet as “easy to use”. When you say something is easy to use, it had damn well better be. Personally, I had to stare at the spreadsheet for a few minutes before I could make heads or tails of it. Describing something as easy to use when it isn’t has the adverse effect of making anyone who doesn’t find it intuitive feel like an idiot.

First, the data is not a table and the first column seems to have absolutely no relation to the matching rows in the other columns. I have no idea what that first column is supposed to represent. Is it the cities from which the comments originated? Who knows.

Second, the acronyms and numbers you see (SPC 3, RT 4, etc.) are supposed to describe the website and comment number which made the suggestion in that column. There’s no legend, so I can only assume that “TI” means Torontoist.com and “RT” means Reading Toronto, “SPC” means Spacing and “BT” means blogTO. No website addresses or comment URLs are given so when this spreadsheet is printed or passed around the internals of the TTC, nobody will know what the heck those letters and numbers mean and won’t know where to go for more information.

Third, the spreadsheet isn’t even using spreadsheet functionality. It’s a table, but it’s not. The comment references are comma-separated across multiple rows, so there’s no way to do anything meaningful with this data such as sum the columns and graph the results, which is what everyone wants to do with spreadsheets. To find comment totals, you will have to manually count the references.

Fourth, you can’t see it from the image but my website is misspelled in row 22. It’s crazedmonkey.com, not crazymonkey.com. Thanks, guys.

Fifth, many of the comments referenced do not match the feature under which they appear (eg. TI 23 under the independent server suggestion). Also, RT 14 does not exist.

How would I have captured the website findings? First, I wouldn’t have made the mistake to release it in spreadsheet form. Instead, a simple HTML page would do the trick. The data can be expressed as a list using CSS styling wherever appropriate:

<ol>
  <li>Suggestion 1
    <ul>
      <li><a href=”link to comment”>website and comment author or number</a></li>
      …
    </ul>
  </li>
  …
</ol>

With the above format, every comment has a link to check. The file or link can still be passed around with no loss of information.

All of this begs the question, why even bother with a findings document at all? The comments are in an open forum which everyone can read and from which they can draw their own conclusions. Releasing a difficult to understand requirements document does nothing to help, but actually serves to inhibit. Who is going to take seriously anyone who creates a spreadsheet like that and passes it off as helpful? It’s well-intentioned but there’s a reason why the requirements gathering process, particularly in the software and usability fields, is left to the experts, or at least those with domain experience.

Update: I have since remixed the suggestion matrix into a HTML page as described above.

Posted on January 24th, 2007 in programming, ttc - 5 Comments »

I was mentioned again in the Toronto section of yesterday’s Globe And Mail, this time in an article on the TTC website redesign. I can’t find the link online, but here’s the paragraph:

During the past year, the TTC went from sending a cease-and-desist letter to blogger John Martz for publishing a satirical subway map — renaming stations with irreverent anagrams — to the new commissioner praising the efforts of Web developer Ian Stevens, who used free Google tools to create a GTA-wide map.

It’s great to see such a change at the TTC with only a change in commissioner. I’m hoping that it won’t stop with the website, but will spread to all aspects of the TTC from scheduling to swag.

Posted on January 9th, 2007 in transitmap, ttc - 2 Comments »

After TTC chairman Adam Giambrone said he would be interesting in hearing input on the TTC site redesign, local blogs Torontoist, the Spacing Wire and BlogTO all took up the cause. Not only will the best ideas sent their way be passed on to the TTC chairman, but the blogs in question have vowed to track the TTC’s responses. Here are some of my suggestions:

1. An accessible website with proper use of HTML with CSS. The current site design relies heavily on Javascript and images for navigation, and doesn’t use HTML properly. I can’t imagine how frustrating the site is to someone who is sight-impaired. The links on the front page to accessible pages aren’t even accessible!

2. A proper bus schedule page. Aside from being lodged in a frame, thereby denying the ability to be bookmarked, the bus schedule page needs a complete rework. First, it only lists major stops, not every one, forcing the user to interpolate stop times. Most importantly, the stop times are pre-formatted in plaintext, not in a table or in a list styled with CSS, as would be preferable. A high school kid wouldn’t even churn out something this bad.

3. Everything should be bookmarkable. Although the TTC site has pages for surface routes, they cannot be bookmarked. Thankfully, Chris Johnson addressed that problem, but the TTC needs to go much further than that. Every surface stop should have its own bookmarkable link, not just major ones like those currently listed.

4. Search. It’s 2007 and I still have to scroll through hundreds of surface routes to get to one I’m interested in. If I don’t know the route numbers by heart, I’m screwed and have to check the map first. All that information should be searchable. Enter a route, get its page. Enter a stop, get its link. Enter a street, get a page with a list of routes and a list of stops on that street. Enter an address or intersection, get a list of stops nearby. It should go without saying that searches should be bookmarkable.

5. Pages for stations. When building my map, I was astonished to find out that each subway station doesn’t have its own page, listing the connecting routes and features of that station. Montreal’s transit system has a page for each station, and it’s light years ahead of the TTC. Just look at this page for Beaubien Metro Station.

6. A trip planner, ideally with Google Transit integration. Mississauga Transit has trip routing, but it’s limited to pre-selected landmarks, is almost unusable (I can’t get the non-standard pulldowns to work) and doesn’t allow bookmarking of the route. A TTC trip planner should route between two addresses or landmarks, and the resulting route should be easily bookmarked for later.

7. Decouple the TTC and City of Toronto pages. Going to ttc.ca redirects me to www.toronto.ca/ttc/. Why is this? Why do many TTC pages have the same look as the City of Toronto pages? Pages for the city and pages for the TTC should be unrelated.

8. A query API for third-party apps. Before I created my transit map, I wanted to build a webpage or a Dashboard app which would quickly list how many minutes before a bus would appear at stops near my favourite locations. Unfortunately, this would have meant wading through the crap that is the pre-formatted TTC bus schedule page and would have necessitated my own surface route database, so I gave up on the idea. It would be wonderful if the TTC could offer an API to its data so that third-party developers could represent the data in new and interesting ways.

That’s all for now. Notice that the trip planner is further down on my list than accessibility-related features. This is because the current site is completely inaccessible, and adding a trip planner would do nothing to help that. Also, a proper trip planner would require an accessible site to work properly. Joe Clark has more ruminations on this subject, be sure to read them.

I’d like to think that my map had a small part in this hunt for ideas. Maybe it was a small catalyst that came on the scene at just the right time, where anger over the TTC website became apparent in the public eye at the time the TTC was considering a redesign. Maybe my map had nothing at all to do with it. One thing is for sure, though, and that’s that it’s high time the TTC website was born anew. Let’s hope they don’t screw it up.

Posted on January 4th, 2007 in ttc - 6 Comments »

I’ve been overwhelmed with the positive feedback for my transit map. The news spread from the Livejournal Toronto community to Torontoist, then to the Spacing wire and Transit Toronto. From there it spread to a slew of other sites, including the CityNews blog. I also just came out of an interview with the National Post, so you can perhaps expect to see a mention in there this weekend. I’ll keep you posted.

As I said, the interest is pretty overwhelming. I’m particularly struck with the disappointment in the TTC for not coming up with something similar much sooner. It’s sad that it took one guy working with a finished product on his laptop to produce something of greater use than the TTC can currently provide with its reams of internal route data. Sure, it’s a complicated system, with over 200 routes, and my map is far from perfect but anything would be better than the information the TTC currently offers.

Stay tuned for more updates. I’m currently working out a way to include user contributions to the map to greater increase its usefulness.

Posted on December 20th, 2006 in transitmap, ttc - 6 Comments »

Now that my Toronto transit map contains many of the features I envisioned when creating its predecessor, it’s time to think of new features I would like to add. What follows are whatever features I can think of. Most of these are pretty zany, involving tedious work, but who said a feature request list had to be realistic?

• GO Train stations and addresses.
• Link generation for a search result so that searches can be bookmarked.
• Optional rendering of station names and info on a separate layer.
• Listing of adjoining surface routes for each station, with link to the schedule for that route.
• Surface routes, subway and train lines on their own layer along with the option to select which layers are displayed.
• Clickable bus and street car line markers which bring up the TTC web page for that line.
• Clickable bus and street car stops which link to the corresponding page on the TTC website.
• Rendering of station entrances.

Of these features, the first five seem to me to be a good combination of usefulness and feasibility. The other three require either large amounts of time and/or the usage of a GPS receiver.

Which features would you like to see?

Posted on November 19th, 2006 in transitmap, ttc - 17 Comments »