CTA Tattler

Ha ha! April fool!

Good to hear they're planning a complete redesign and I'm glad they're looking to model the new site after Boston. It's one of the better transit sites out there. Hopefully the design agency that wins the bid is capable of producing something as good, if not better.

One of the main things I'd like to see in a redesign is conformity among the entire site. For example, currently the Bus Tracker site has a different look and feel from the rest of the site and there's not an easy way to get back to CTA's home page. Simply having a consistent and uniform navigation system will greatly enhance the usability of the site.

On the features side, it'd be nice to have RSS feeds throughout, particularly for service alerts and news. This should be coupled with the implementation of an email and SMS-based alerts system.

The CTA has a lot of great content on their site and there's a huge opportunity to do some amazing things with the design and with integration of other web services (for example, Boston's use of Google Maps to show bus routes complete with bus stops on the schedules page).

"An RFP for the CTA site redesign has been issued, and the CTA board will soon vote on who wins the job, Case said. "

Is that how it works??? I thought the purchasing department and user department have to follow stringent standards to determine who the recommended vendor is. Then the board votes to award the contract - or not. Flouting federal purchasing rules can send someone to prison.

It would be nice if the designers stringently followed ADA requirements for Web access and minimized or eliminated the use of Java and Javascript to ensure the broadest possible compatibility with mobile devices.

While CSS is unfortunately endemic these days, it also typically destroys legibility and usability on mobile devices. Maybe they can do a little testing there too.

JohnT: What in the world are you talking about?

As for the redesign, this is good news. My question is why not just have the same in-house people do the redesign who just updated the home page? Would that not be cheaper? Or, possibly, the CTA management dosen't think the inhouse people are up to the task?

In-house is a skeleton crew. Very hard to devote your entire work-week to a single project. CTA likes to farm out this stuff and then dump the support end of it on employees.

"skeleton crew"? I'd like to see how large their staff actually was there. I'd bet it's actually more than adequate to update a web site. Its not rocket science. Heck, you could probably get a couple of student interns from one of the local colleges to do it for free.

Kevin

Everyone thinks they're a web designer, but few people can really do it right. And with a site like the CTA's, there's just so many aspects to it all...

Expecting their in-house staff to be able to build a whole new website is like expecting your bus mechanics to be able to build a new bus from scratch.

This is the kind of project that should be given to a firm that knows how to do it right. A firm with people who are pros at redesigning websites, making them usable, and compliant with both web standards, as well as accessability standards.

>>>
Flouting federal purchasing rules can send someone to prison.
<<<

First off, who says any Federal funds are involved?

Secondly, why do you think that "An RFP for the CTA site redesign has been issued, and the CTA board will soon vote on who wins the job, Case said." violates any rules? It doesn't even violate the rules as you stated.

Before you even would certify that a vendor is qualified, you have to find out what vendors are interested in the project. You put out an RFP. And then then end of the process is the board votes to approve.

Nothing was said that indicates any other necessary intermediate steps wouldn't be part of the process. All that was stated was the begining and end points of the process to hire a firm.

The board always gets a chance to overrule a staff recomondation. Otherwise there would be no purpose in having the board.

well, maybe some students from one of the colleges that umm, has web design programs with degrees and all that., I'm sure you have to hire some fancy firm for lots of money to do something like this, not...then again, I've seen so called "professional web design firms" whose use of flash and other fancy dohickeys make a site unusable other than in a very specific case.

Unless the CTA has money to throw away (it doesn't) then I'm sure that they could find some alternative to spending alot of money, but then again, the CTA hasn't got alot of experience in keeping things on budget (hint, hint block 37).

For all the things that I disagree with Kevin and the tattler on, the web site here is easy to use, doesn't throw alot at you and is aesthetically pleasing without being non-functional.

So, spare us the "union label" crap please.

KevinB

Sigh. KevinB, there's a huge difference between a blog and a professional Web site. The Typepad crew does the maintenance on the back end here. The CTA doesn't have that luxury.

The site my employer maintains has had to switch back end platforms because the one we've used was acquired and discontinued; we're months behind in the conversion not only because of the training required (which the new vendor, let's say, sorely underestimated) but because we're finding bugs by the bucket, and we'd really like to get it right the first time. You may think website management is just monkeys typing into text editors, but at a professional level, it's database management at a very miserable level. I'm happy to be out of the field and in a lower-paying but less stressful career.

I know there's a difference, but it isn't as rocket science as the other guy is saying.

I used to work in a job where I dealt on a daily basis with hacks hired by fortune 500 companies via ad reps. It was all about whiz bang crap that looked pretty but was really only functional on a very limited set of browsers and high bandwidths. These people made ungodly amounts of money because they were those "professional companies". I had to bite my tongue when they were doing presentations since we were hosting the sites and providing the back ends so that they could do target based marketing with our group.

For the most part, the ones that failed horribly were from those big companies. The most successful ones were from small, hungry, creative companies.

Kevin

I've seen a lot of fancy dohickeys come from "professional" designers. But those designers were the equalvalent of corespondence school art grads vs someone with a BFA. They may both be professionals, but they're not in the same league.

The CTA website isn't just an advertisement for the newest restaurant in town. It's not even a manufacturer showing-off their latest product line, or providing an online knowledge base for troubleshooting. It's not even a newspaper's website, posting updates throughout the day.

The CTA's website represents what is probably pretty close to the top tier in importance on the web. It's relevance may be local, but it's utility needs to be through the roof!

You've got a library of schedules, maps, the trip planner, real-time news, service announcements, business information, shopping, and someday, real-time tracking of every vehicle on every route.

Everyone who comes to the site has different needs. They all want to be able to find what they want easily. In other words, there needs to be more than one "most important" focus to the site.

That's the kind of usablity issues that student interns aren't equiped to handle. Nor would I expect anyone on staff to be capable of being the project manager for such an undertaking. There's no need to keep someone with that kind of specialized skill set on staff when a site redesign isn't happening.

Hiring people who know what to do, and how to do it isn't a waste of money. It saves money.

I'd have to say that anyone who thinks this is something that could be done in-house or with student interns basically has no concept of the scope of what we're talking about here.

You've got to be able to recognise when the project you're contemplating goes beyond what you can do yourself. Any homeowner who's ever found themselves over their head in a project ought to understand. But then again, there are some people who are more proud than smart that have never learned that lesson even after being taught it the hard way.

Two things I would really like to see:

1. A smarter search function. Currently, when I type "8 S. Michigan Ave" as my starting point or destination, it gives me an "uncertain location" message. Specifying "Chicago" as the city doesn't help any, and it still returns two possible locations outside of Chicago. The other two locations are both 8 S. Michigan Ave, but in two different ZIP codes. Huh? Please make this smarter!

2. An easy way of looking at bus routes. If this information exists at all, I've never found it, and it would be a fantastic addition to a redesigned site! Currently, if I want to see where, say, the 6 Jackson Park Express runs, I have to pull up a .pdf file. That file lists only a handful of stops, an abstract map which bears no reference to a city map of Chicago, and lists of times. Yikes! And the Central System Map isn't that much easier to follow. There has to be a better way of looking up bus routes. I've lived in Chicago 2 1/2 years and most of my bus route information comes from commuters who know the route well.

Looking forward to a redesign!

I'd like to know why the main navigation links on the redesigned homepage do not point to anything other than a href = "#" ?

I have to go to a submenu to get any kind of link. Anyone that understands usability will tell you if something looks like a link users will try to click it. At the very least create landing pages that have some information if a user clicks the "About" button. However, I think the CTA has enough literature to fill in all of these areas sufficiently.

Hopefully, whatever firm the CTA ends up contracting with will do a full usability study on the current CTA web site, and iterative testing throughout the development process.

The CTA should read this as a primer: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

I guess it depends on how much the CTA proposes to pay an outside contractor, but redesigning the website really isn't that large a job. It's not that complicated a website.

If the CTA is going to spend extra money on its online features, I'd rather that they pay someone to finally figure out how to make the trip planner work right. Regardless of precisely you type in the name of a CTA rail station, the thing now makes you choose from a list of every station in the system anyway! And the thing has never taken the existence of the purple line express into account properly when computing fastest trips between the Loop and Evanston. The system should also have more flexibility, like an option for prioritizing travel routes that have frequent service (e.g., CTA) over those that have infreqent service (e.g., PACE) when there's overlap; if you need to head west on Cermak Rd from the end of the pink line, and you can take the 21, why on earth would you want to hang around waiting for the 304??

CTA staff seems to have done a good job on the front page of the website; if we're talking about a six-month timeframe, I'm sure they would do just fine on the rest. Heck, if it would avoid paying some unnecessary fee to an outside contractor, I'd rather they take 12 months to redesign the thing.

"I guess it depends on how much the CTA proposes to pay an outside contractor, but redesigning the website really isn't that large a job. It's not that complicated a website"

The CTA doesn't pay all that much compared with what a firm would make from a privately held company for a similar job. Firms are willing to accept less for the job because it is a high-profile site.

You also can't judge the complexity of the job just by looking at the current site. You have to consider the back-end systems; the way the site is integrated with the CTA's other computer systems (for things like real-time tracking, etc.); whether the current system is suited to what they want to do with the site in the future, or if they would be better off starting over; etc. A lot of people seem to be confusing redesigning the site with making it look different. I would guess that the visual design of the site is probably only about 25-25% of the actual work that will go into the job.

Also, to address johnt's comments from earlier, part of the RFP process for a firm is to prove that they meet any requirements that the CTA may have in order to get the work. I don't know what the CTA's requirements are, but the process is designed to weed out any firms that don't meet them beforehand.

Let's not forget the trippy Trip Planner belongs to RTA not CTA. The CTA site redesign won't do anything to aleviate the Alice in Wonderland quality of the Trip Planner. Last summer I encountered some tourists on the westbound Chicago Ave. bus. They were trying to get to Millenium Park and had a Trip Planner printout that told them to get on the westbound Chicago Ave. bus. Luckily they asked if they were going the right way before they got west of Western Ave.

@KevinB:

Please stop talking, you're embarrassing yourself.

You clearly have an extremely limited view of what web design is. There are certainly a lot of horrible, lazy web designers out there, and a lot of them get contracts they have no business even competing for. But this notion that "web design isn't rocket science" is utterly ridiculous.

Web design is a delicate balance among usability, interface design, graphic design and web development -- and probably more disciplines that aren't readily coming to mind.

And to be honest, it's idiots like you who make it hard for people like me, who actually know what they're doing, to make a living with this craft, because people think they shouldn't spend a lot of money on web design because it's so "easy." So please, before you speak about something you clearly don't understand, just go ahead and stop. Thanks.