The Big 5.0: Transit app gets a makeover
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It did exactly one thing well that I wanted: it looked at my current location and gave me ETAs for all of the nearby lines, MUNI, BART, whatever it was I might need. At the time I was mulling my own ideas about an app, more or less like this, but it dropped from my considerations once I discovered this app.
It's been a more consistent companion than my choice of web browsers, mail clients, search engines, note apps, operating systems or whatever, and I've pretty much never felt any need to actually replace it.
Some apps just do one thing and do it very well. Kudos to Transit app.
Visually, I feel like the app is still in 2015. Lots of clashing colors, super heavy shadow and the new green search bar feels slapped on. These are opinions though :) .
Hats off to the team.
Or oh hey light blue. There's a Divvy station nearby. I think I'll bike today.
I love the color presentation of Transit App, personally for this very reason.
E.g. the green floating search box. What does making this green help with? Again, these are opinions, but it looks a little jenky to me.
In the case I mentioned, it makes sense because the CTA train lines are quite literally designated by colors (The blue line runs from O'Hare International into downtown, red line from Evanston to south of the city etc), therefore opening the app and seeing a rainbow of colors represents the colored transit modes. So in that context it makes sense, that may have been less than clear in my first comment here.
Regarding the search bar though I think I agree
This is more a styling thing (similar to fashion) but apps have shifted away from this heavy color to more grey, white or dark theme with color used less as more of an accent or to highlight certain features / parts of the UI.
I think Transit app could benefit from going with a more plain color for backgrounds and use their bright colors more sparingly. IMO, less can be more. The whole row of a bus line doesn't need to be red or blue to get the point across for me.
For numbered buses I think this makes sense and is already the case, in my example, the Chicago Transit rail line, the different rails aren't numbered, they are literally designated by color-as in going to the blue line all of the signage is blue indicating which line station you're at (NYC for example has numbered transit lines for their trains). Said a better way: in some cities certain transit modes don't have names or numbers, but are literally designated by color. We don't have a 6 train, we have a Blue line. The app is consistent with this-and for me that makes perfect sense.
That's why I think-in this instance, and in many others where various public transit modes are designated by color (I think the MTA in Atlanta does?)-it makes perfect sense. It isn't that the Transit App is arbitrarily assigning colors, the colors are assigned to represent how the Chicago Transit Authority _themselves_ have designated each disparate rail line by color.
In other cases, everything else has the same color. Bus line 80, 72, 76 are all just a standard blue color.
Overall though, I completely get your point.
Big blocks of color are great. Big blocks of color are easy to read in a half a second while you’re walking through the crowds on the sidewalk.
Even if I had only 1 second in your hypothetical scenario, color doesn't help me differentiate the 2 bus lines from the same agency that don't rely on color at all.
Color is one tool in a suite of tools that designers can choose from to draw attention. My point was over reliance on color looks ugly. Typing this one standing up for you
I saw this post on the bus, installed the app. Checked what it says for my transfer. I had about 8 minutes.
Google said my bus comes at 7:29. Transit app says it comes at 7:37. The bus came at 7:29. The app didn't match the posted time table either.
This is in a major tech area next to a major university. Their About screen lists dozens of local transit authorities as data sources, with the one running the bus in question as a licensed source.
App deleted.
If your cellular connection is bad (or the tower is congested), you can be looking at a quite old transfer time without any visual indication of that fact. If you were offline, the app would tell you it was falling back to a schedule. If the request actually timed out and failed it would do the same. But because the request is stuck in dropped-packet-limbo, it isn't obvious.
Sometimes I tap into the map and back out to get it to re-send the request. Then the transfer times will all jump and update to reasonable values.
(This is just behavior I'm deducing from using the app and watching it say the next N is 2 minutes, then after waiting 30-40 seconds it jumps to 15 minutes. Clearly they were showing me stale data at the time)
The new design isn’t helping much at all.