Good Enough for Government Work
Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 12:01am 5 comments (last by Jeffrey W. Baker)
A few years ago the department of parking and traffic and the SF Municipal Railway (Muni) were merged into a single transportation agency, the SFMTA. This week the SFMTA launched a new web site, and done away with the Muni web site entirely.
Their goal was to combine the different SFMTA services into a single site, but this was driven by the agencies being merged, not because this is better for riders, drivers and users. Why would a Muni rider be interested in a link called named walk? True, you have to walk to the bus stop, but you'd be making a mistake there because walk relates to pedestrian safety.
Also missing for the muni web site is the Muni brand name itself. Here it's simply labeled transit because the SFMTA doesn't understand yet that the agency and the services it offers are not one and the same.
Tonight I had a chance to speak with the designers (who didn't have to just deal with a web site, but all these internal structural issues) and will write more on this soon.
5 Comments
Eric C. Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 10:07am
"Why would a Muni rider be interested in a link called named walk?"
Isn't this obvious? Because clearly, it's faster to walk than to take Muni :-)
Seriously though, I'm glad you wrote about this. I didn't know that a new site was in the works, so it was a surprise to see it the first time. And while I appreciate the sentiments about the importance of livable streets and the like, it doesn't seem ideal to have someone who is looking for a bus schedule to have to click a link that says "transit", when they thought they were visiting the Muni site. It's fine to have people click links off the main page, but there are clearer ways to indicate this than with just the word "transit."
The other thing I don't like about the site -- and I never thought I would ever say this about anything having to do with Muni -- is that it is a bit too stylish. On each page, the important content riders are probably searching for (maps, schedules, etc.) are contained in links shoved to the top of the page. Meanwhile, large spreads about how scenic San Francisco is occupy the main portion of the page. It'd be nice if the functional parts of the website -- the actual data, information, etc. -- were a bit better integrated with the style.
Still, it's great to finally have a Muni site that looks nicer than what a 3rd grader might make if he/she were learning HTML for the first time.
Jamison Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 10:55am
Transit as a generic replacement of Muni is misleading since the SFMTA operates only one of a dozen transit agencies in San Francisco. Visitors might get the impression this covers everything not just Muni.
There is also a chance the opposite can happen when someone not that familiar with transit in the City (someone who has to look for info online for example) looks up transit information and when they get to a station there is no SFMTA transit system, only two systems named Muni and BART.
I think they have the right goal of trying to show the SFMTA is more than just transit and parking, but the execution needs a lot of work.
Last night I started tinkering with a design that keeps the Muni brand and showing it's relationship to the SFMTA. I'll make a post when it's a bit more fleshed out.
Eric C. Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 3:30pm
Nice! I'm looking forward to seeing your design.
Jeffrey W. Baker Saturday, January 27, 2007 at 12:52pm
Wow, that site is horrible. And I love the URL "http://www.sfmta.com/cms/home/sfmta.sfmta". Do you think they could have jammed a _fourth_ "sfmta" in there somewhere? The double angle brackets as bullets? The white on black?
I give them an F.
Jeff Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 8:36am
And I don't know if it's just me and my eyes, but having to look at so much white on black AND black on white on each page... the contrast is a bit much. Couldn't they have gotten some softer colors on there?