Conceptology

Attending the Information Architecture Institution’s annual IDEA conference this year should be easy for those of us in Toronto, because the conference will be held here. It’s the first time that the conference is held north of the US-Canada border, and I’m as excited as the rest of the IA & IxD community in TO. Full details on the program don’t seem to be available on the IDEA site yet, but registration is open.

Tags:   conferences · IAI · IDEA 2009 · TorontoNo Comments.

Afshan Kirmani recently wrote an article for UXmatters on including recommendations in user interfaces to enhance motivation. I highly recommend the post - it’s a great read with plenty of examples on how and where to give recommendations.

Tags:   Interface design · recommendations · User motivationsNo Comments.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote the first part of this post, so I figure it’s good time to bring out the second part now. The timing seems good, now that GTA transit has just got its first significant injection of funding in a long while.

Without further a due, here’s my second list of ideas on how to improve public transit in Toronto:

1. Repair the old equipment
While bigger projects wait for funding and approval for years, sometimes decades, you would think that Toronto would at least take care of the existing equipment and infrastructure. What was once, many decades ago, a fairly efficient, progressively growing transit system, is now grinding to a halt. Of the existing streetcar fleet, around 30% have no heat at all. This in a city that gets snow and freezing cold for months every year. And now because there are not enough operational streetcars left to run all services, the TTC is considering temporarily (?) replacing streetcar service with buses on Bathurst Street and Kingston Road.

It could be easy to say that the TTC’s current streetcar fleet, dating back to 1977 - 1988, is just too old and there’s nothing that can be done until Toronto gets brand new cars (possibly) in 2011. But there are other cities, like Helsinki, Finland, and Zürich, Switzerland, where several streetcars built in the 1970’s and early 80’s are still in active use, fixed and retrofitted with improved A/C and other things like free Wi-Fi.

Since the coming of the new streetcars seems to take its sweet time in Toronto, meanwhile the city could look into buying used streetcars from another city, like Helsinki did in a similar situation, to ease things. Or at least fix issues like heating on all the old streetcars currently in use. A streetcar with a factory-installed heating system that doesn’t work is simply broken and shouldn’t be on the road until it’s fixed.

2. Build a new subway line through downtown
Luckily this idea has suddenly gathered momentum recently, after a few decades of neglect. Extending the existing two subway lines north, east or west is as good as any service extension, but it won’t solve the transportation needs of the city’s downtown core. The Transit City LRT plan won’t help the downtown either. Toronto won’t be able to truthfully call itself a “world class city” without an adequate public transit system in its downtown area, and a new subway line through the core is the only really powerful solution.

3. Build right of way lanes for buses and streetcars
Cars can be great for some purposes, especially as they get more fuel efficient. Cars are good for some long distance travel, for fun road trips, for occasions when you need to move something bigger than your everyday groceries and a couple bottles of wine. But cars are not good for everyday transport in big cities. Period. That’s not a matter of opinion, it’s not a a matter of political views or ideology. It’s just a simple fact that there are limits to how many cars you can fit on a city street, and you can’t constantly keep expanding and widening highways as the city’s population grows. For a big city, you need efficient mass transit instead of private cars. Not because it’s “green”, though that comes with it too, but because it improves the quality and efficiency of life in the city.

That is something that North Americans, by and large, have not understood. Car companies were let to lobby public transit down and tear away existing streetcar networks at the early stages of wide-scale urban development on this continent. Now only one city in North America, New York, matches up to the levels of ridership and the extent of the urban public transit networks in Europe.

More right of way lanes would make things easier and safer not just for public transit, but for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. While European cities have built their streetcar systems largely along right of way lanes already a long time ago, Toronto has let drivers and business owners hamper the development of its own streetcar network. The result is that now everybody - transit users and drivers alike - complains.

4. Find a permanent solution to the funding of Toronto’s transit system
The TTC is the largest transit operator in Anglo-America not to receive provincial/state funding. As I stated in the previous point, it’s a simple fact that big cities need efficient, well-funded and well planned public transit systems. The system needs to be funded not just from the fare box, but from the public budget.

5 - 9. Build more lines, lower fares, increase efficiency, add more frequency, modernize services
Below is a chart that shows how Toronto compares to several other big cities and urban areas in the world. Surely, a lot needs to be done to bring Toronto up to the European standard, or to match up with New York and Tokyo. Surely, the longer Toronto waits, the more expensive it becomes to fix things.

Take a look at cities like Helsinki and Stockholm in particular. Both have much smaller populations than Toronto, but run public transit networks that are not only bigger but also cheaper to use. Or have a look at Berlin, which is very close to the size of Toronto, but the size of the public transit system there is far greater. 30-day passes in Berlin aren’t particularly cheap, but the system there offers way more bang for the buck than TTC. For example, commuter trains in Berlin (S-Bahn) and in Helsinki (lähijuna) use electric rail and typically run every 5 minutes at rush hour, whereas GO trains in Toronto use diesel engines and run only about every 20 - 30 minutes at rush hour. Only the two Lakeshore GO lines operate throughout the day - the rest operate only during the morning and evening peaks, whereas in Berlin and Helsinki there is extensive all day service and night trains.

10. Free public transit on smog days
Smog is a real problem in Toronto - some 1,700 people die every year from smog-related illnesses in Toronto. Many cities in Europe have special smog-fighting measures that can very significantly limit the use of private cars on the worst days. A significant amount of air pollution in Toronto is said to be from coal power plants and heavy industry from across the border, but about 50% of it is said to be from local traffic. Currently the TTC doesn’t offer anything extra on smog days - probably because there is not enough capacity to move everybody even on normal days - but that should change. In Toronto, only about 23% of commuters take public transit. In New York, the number is 60%, and in cities like Stockholm and Helsinki it’s between 70 - 75%. If the public transit network in Toronto can’t move even one quarter of commuters in the city efficiently, while other cities transport 75%, how can the public transit network in Toronto be adequate enough to help clean up the air in the city?

11. Connect the Toronto Island ferry to the TTC fare system

12. Plan transit first
It’s unbelievable how whole new areas of condos and houses go up in Toronto without any access to transit. It makes me wonder who, if anyone, actually really plans and controls development in this city. Transit should be planned and built as the city expands to new areas, not just added maybe decades later.

—

The list could go on, but I’ll leave it here now. Many in Toronto are saying that there have been great improvements since Adam Giambrone and Brad Ross started working at TTC, and mayor David Miller does seem to have a commitment to developing public transit. Right now it looks like things are starting to move ahead. But how long will it last? Will it change again with the next government, or are Canadian leaders finally starting to consistently realize that public transit is a necessity? From my own, European perspective, Toronto seems desperately backwards in the development of public transit, as does the rest of this country. Like Michael Warren, former chief general manager of the TTC, puts it in this recent article in The Toronto Star: “Neither the province nor the area municipalities have made major investments in the GTHA’s transportation system for over a generation. They have tried to accommodate rapid population and economic growth by relying on a decades-old transportation network, one that is collapsing under the weight of endless political rhetoric and inaction.”

Tags:   Canada · infrastructure · public transit · rants · Toronto · urban planning1 Comment

Those of you who don’t live in Toronto can probably skip this post. This post isn’t about online information architecture. It is a bit about marketing and communication strategies, but not about mobile or semantic web, or social networks, really. But it is definitely about user experience.

This post is inspired by a colleague at work, who one morning again complained about the experience he had had trying to get to work on crowded TTC streetcars. At the end of his long complaint, which I could easily agree on, he said: “I don’t care what they say - it really isn’t The Better Way,” making reference to the common slogan of the Toronto Transit Commission.

For large cities, punctual and efficient public transit is not just a better way, but a necessity. The current system in Canada’s most populous city, Toronto, is neither punctual nor efficient. In this post, I list some ideas of how to improve the system. Considering how outdated and inadequate some parts of Toronto’s (public transit) infrastructure have become, I know that some of the necessary improvements will now take not just large amounts of money, but also time. Others, however, would be easy to implement almost immediately and with very little funding. While we’re waiting for big things like the Transit City plan really start happening, here are some smaller ideas. In another post later (pt 2), I’ll list bigger things.

1. Ensure that route schedules and information are available at every stop
A simple thing, clearly signposting the numbers and names of the routes that stop at a particular stop, would make the system easier to use. This is done in most other major cities in the world, but in Toronto the signs that mark the stops usually don’t show the numbers and/or destinations of the routes that stop there.

And an online route planner. Yes, a quick, easy-to-use route planner (that the TTC says they’re maybe finally working on now?) would be a very basic thing that the city should have. They have it in London, in Ottawa, in New York, in Helsinki, in Berlin, and in Vancouver, for example. Why not here? There are community built versions in Toronto, which  is absolutely great (love #ttcu_community & TTCupdates.com too!), but why does it have to take private individuals to build these things here?

2. Stop idling buses at stations
Toronto has an idling control bylaw, which aims to limit idling to no more than three minutes in a 60 minute period. I’ve never seen it actually enforced, but according to councillor Howard Moscoe city bylaw officers hand out about one anti-idiling ticket (!) per year. TTC vehicles are currently exempted. Now councillor Moscoe, himself a former TTC chair, is pushing for the idling control bylaw to apply to TTC as well. It’s sad to see TTC, supposed to be the greener way, buses spew out fumes at subway stations for 10 or 15 minutes, while the doors are left open (so it clearly isn’t about keeping the passengers warm). The engine could easily be turned off for the duration of the wait. Burning all that gas idling also means burning more of the cash-strapped TTC’s money.

3. Clearly announce and explain short turns
Short turning, i.e. a streetcar turning off its scheduled route before it reaches its scheduled destination, is like short selling the service. Short turning is particularly common on the 501 Queen line. But what’s worse is that often short turns aren’t clearly announced by the driver. Tonight I got on a College car at Spadina, and not much later, at Bathurst, it suddenly short turned. The driver perhaps had made an earlier announcement, but not after I got on board with several other people at Spadina.

4. Introduce time based transfer on all lines
Since July 2005, TTC has been running a time based transfer pilot program on the 512 St Clair route. What I don’t understand is why that hasn’t been introduced across the whole TTC network a long time ago. Time based transfer is the standard in European cities, allowing riders to get on and off at will - in both directions - typically during a 60 to 90 minute window after they paid the fare.

5. Always exit through the rear door, and always move to the back
This one’s to fellow TTC customers: please use the rear door, not the front, for exiting, like the sign says, unless you really don’t have an option, and always move to the back. For as long as there are no significant service improvements and the TTC streetcars and buses are as packed as they are, please let’s use them as efficiently as we can.

6. Transparency and integrity
After I remind myself that the TTC is in fact the least subsidized public transit system in North America and perhaps the world, I can actually think that it’s quite incredible that the TTC manages to do this much with the little money they have. With about 70 - 78 per cent of the cost of the system borne by riders, it can’t get significantly better unless the politicians in this country (and the people who vote them in power) start seeing public transit as the essential element of city building that it is instead of just a social service to be ignored.

Given the fact that the TTC itself can’t change the way the province and the federal government do their budgets, I think the TTC could take a friendlier approach by simply saying “hey, we know it should be way better, but we’re doing our best.” So why then did it take a visually impaired lawyer to file a lawsuit against the TTC and an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruling to get the TTC to institute the automated stop announcement system on all streetcars, buses and subways? The TTC, yes, the very same TTC that’s too cash-strapped to improve its services, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to fight the lawsuit, according to reports. These kind of things make it sound like the TTC has something against its customers, the people who pay for most of the Commission’s budget.

To me another example of the TTC’s attitude is this. In the “excerpts from the final report from the Mayor’s Independent Fiscal Review Panel,” written by the TTC, it claims “by most international benchmarks it [the TTC] is among the best in the world.” However, the page on the TTC website doesn’t actually name any of those “international benchmarks.” I looked at the original document that the sentence is taken from, mayor Miller’s “Blueprint for Fiscal Stability and Economic Prosperity — a Call to Action”. The long report looks perfectly sane to me, for most part. But the same sentence, “by most international benchmarks it [the TTC] is among the best in the world,” appears with no further explanation there, too.

It is comments like that that really make me wonder. Haven’t TTC officials, Toronto city workers ever travelled in Europe or Asia? Haven’t they ever used public transit there? Haven’t they ever compared the vast transit network in Berlin, where the amount of population is very close to Toronto, to the TTC?

There’s a comment in Steve Munro’s blog that maybe offers some explanation to why the TTC talks about itself that way. The comment reads: “…it takes the TTC an eternity to admit it’s wrong about anything.  This is a deep flaw in their corporate culture, but not surprising for a large organization used to thinking it’s the best in the world.”

Recently, there have been some small but notable improvements. TTC’s Director of Communication, Brad Ross, and Commissioner and Councillor Adam Giambrone have joined Twitter, which is a brave move. Twitter is instant and feedback is direct. This kind of openness is very welcome.

Other recent improvements include the e-alert service that’s finally available, (hopefully it will soon be SMS-based and more similar to, say, the alert system that’s been in use in Helsinki for years) and the next vehicle arrival notification system. Similar systems have been in use in European cities for much longer.

7. SMS tickets
It looks like the TTC won’t have a modern smartcard-based payment system in use for a while. But a simple SMS-ticket system, like the one that’s been in use in Helsinki, Finland for years, would be easy to implement (if Canadian mobile network operators choose to co-operate). It would make it quick and easy to pay for a ride without having to look for change or a convenience store that’s not out of tokens today.

8. Cell phone coverage in the subway system
When there’s a service disruption on the subway, and you’re on your way to an important meeting, wouldn’t it be nice to send a text message to say you’ll be late? It shouldn’t be too hard to work with the different network operators to get things working. This has been done in Europe and Asia. In Helsinki, where the subway was dug deep into the bedrock, there is still perfect coverage on the trains and at all stations. And not just cell phone networks, but the city also offers free Wi-Fi on the subway and some streetcars and buses.

UPDATE: According to this article in the NP, posted in December, TTC is now seriously planning to install cell phone networks in the subway system. Installation could take two to three years. Once cell phones are covered, maybe we’ll see Wi-Fi one day? It shouldn’t be too hard. In Helsinki, Wi-Fi on the subway uses the same cables and technology that was built for the cell phones networks earlier, but different frequencies.

That’s the list for now. Next time I’ll roll out some more. In the meanwhile, here’s a couple good links that I recommend:
TTC now just ‘hick town transit’
Free transit touted elsewhere, but not in Toronto
Suffering the TTC

Tags:   Canada · customer experience · Mobile · public transit · rants · Toronto · urban infrastructure · user experience9 Comments

Jonathan Salem Baskin is the author of a book called “Branding Only Works on Cattle.” I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve checked the foreword and Jonathan’s blog, and I’m particularly fascinated by what Jonathan says about games and branding.

Games, and namely video games, are addictive. Just look at the Nintendo Wii craze, or Sony Playstation before that, and all successful video games, consoles and computer games since the 1970’s. People give games lots and lots of their time over long stretches. They keep coming back to them, ignoring several other, more important influences in their lives.

Marketers have known this for long, and you can find mainstream consumer products (and a certain presidential candidate’s campaign ads) placed in video games. Agencies are telling their corporate clients that brands need to do things with games.

But Jonathan thinks that instead of brands doing things with games, games need to do things to brands. We shouldn’t twist games to support our old ideas about brands, and have brands use game tactics. Instead, brand (and business) strategies should get configured like games, says Jonathan. “Marketers mistakenly see games as a lowest-common-denominator channel, instead of realizing that games are not channels at all, but rather places, like social media, only with a purpose,” he continues.  Games are models of places where people live, worlds that have rules, roles, expected behaviors, and even dimensions of time. Perhaps most important, video games are places where people go to do things. Games are built upon creative ideas, but they’re experienced with behavior, says Jonathan.

I can’t think of any close examples of that yet. Can’t say that I’ve seen any brand designed like a game. But I find the idea really thrilling. And I noticed this upcoming webinar, organized by Rosenfeld Media and given by John Ferrara, on extending game design to business applications. It’s not exactly the same as what Jonathan Salem Baskin writes about, but nevertheless I’ll sign up for it. If anybody has examples of brands like games, please comment. I first thought of the old Nokia Game and other ARGs, but those are not quite the thing.

Photo credit: David Farrant (Creative Commons)

Tags:   Branding · Brands · Gaming · Marketing · Strategy · Webinars1 Comment

Internet meme: Seven Random Things About You

Happy New Year! I’ve been tagged by Marta Strickland, who was tagged by Stacy Lukas, who was tagged by Ken Burbary, who was tagged by… (yes, this is a chain letter type of thing) to list seven random things about myself. The way this whole thing works is simple: list seven things about yourself in a blog post, then tag seven new people at the end of the post. Without further ado, here’s my list of seven things, in no particular order:

1. I’m a geography geek. I’m not as good anymore as I was as a 10-year old, but I can still place (almost) any country correctly on the map, remember the names of (almost) all capital cities and love reading about the history of random towns and cities around the world on Wikipedia. I drew a world map from memory some years ago and hung it up on my wall. What’s the capital of Montenegro? Podgorica. Where is Vanuatu? In the South Pacific Ocean, north-east of New Caledonia.

2. I’ve never had any major injuries, broken bones, or operations. I better knock on wood now, but I’ve never suffered any broken bones or been hospitalized since I was born. I played hockey for several years when I was young (now I don’t really care for hockey at all), drove go-karts (now I don’t really like cars) and I was in judo for long enough to earn an orange belt, but I was never a rough kid, and shied away from most tough games other boys played. Maybe that’s why I never really got hurt, and I like to think that my barefoot long-distance running is saving me from a few colds a year.

3. I have a fetish for airports and airlines. Although not as strong anymore as it used to be, mostly due to my environmental concerns and long-distance travel fatigue, I love airports, planes and random facts about different airlines. I used to run an air travel themed record label called Abflug, which is German for (flight) departure.

4. I’m an electronic musician and a deejay. This is not a very unknown, or random, fact about me, but maybe getting a bit weird as I get older? I ran a record store in my original home town, Tampere, in Finland in the 90’s. I’m not one of the brightest stars in the world of minimal techno and house, but I’ve managed to make myself a little bit of a name, toured around Europe, North America and Japan, and released more than a handful tracks on vinyl, CD, and MP3.

5. I’m the only man in my family in my generation. My family isn’t very big, on my mom’s side I’ve got one aunt and uncle and a handful of cousins. My dad had nine siblings, but many of them had no kids, and those who did are/were much older than my father, who’s almost the youngest child in the family. My cousin Kyösti is getting close to 60, and I can say that I’m the only man in my family in my generation.

6. I’m a very bad swimmer. I do dog paddle. I can also swim a bit of breaststroke for very short distances, and awkward front crawl. We had swimming lessons in elementary school, but to me they consisted of kids bullying each other and teachers forcing us to learn quickly or not learn at all. I had no fun.

7. I long for warmer, sunnier climate and think that I was meant to live in Mauritius. Not that I want to speed up the climate change by any means or that I don’t like the infrastructure, services, and quality of living in certain countries in the northern hemisphere, but I’m not a winter person and my skin always suffers from the lack of sunlight and the cold air. When I worked in the United Arab Emirates I seriously enjoyed the days it was 50 degrees (122 Fahrenheit) out. The hotter the better.

Now, here are the rules and the people I pick next (please let me know if you’ve already been tagged, so I can choose a new victim):

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

• Pekka Nikrus
• Craig Ritchie
• Jokko Korhonen
• Matti Keltanen
• Chiva Congelado
• Eero Holmila
• Peter Boersma

Tags:   Memes · Random · Tagging2 Comments

Musicovery is a customized webradio service that lets users search for music not just by genres, but by mood as well. Are you looking for energetic, calm, positive or dark music?

Following Musicovery’s idea, I Feel… city guides let users add and recommend places and things to do in a city by mood. Where do people go in New York, when they feel romantic? What about Londoners - what do they do, when they feel hungover? I Feel… which is currently in beta, is now available for New York, London and Toronto.

The site’s based on a pretty simple Google Maps mashup with a cutesey look. But the organization model makes it interesting, and a great exercise in information architecture. What other sites organized by mood or other non-traditional model do you know?

Tags:   Concepts · Information architecture · Organization schemes · TravelNo Comments.

I wrote a new post about augmented reality (AR) - the combination of real world and computer-generated data - in Organic’s Three Minds blog today. There are some very interesting mobile AR applications, like Wikitude for the G1 phone, already available, and Nokia’s launching a similar concept called Point and Find soon.

Read the whole post here.

Tags:   Android · augmented reality · Location-based services · MobileNo Comments.

At the Nokia World event in Barcelona, Nokia today unveiled the new N97 ‘mobile computer’, as the company calls it. The feature list of the device, which combines a touchscreen and a QWERTY keybord, easily tops the iPhone’s features, with 32 Gb of inbuilt memory (expandable up to 48 Gb), 5 megapixel camera capable of recording video, Flash player, etc.

Featurewise, many knew to expect something like this. With touchscreens, Nokia is behind its competitors who have already rolled out several touchscreen and touchscreen + QWERTY devices ever since the first iPhone was originally announced in the beginning of 2007 (though people forget that Nokia did, in fact, launch its first touch screen phone, the 7700, already almost five years ago). Nokia is known for its good engineering and components, but engineering or the length of the technical feature list alone don’t equal good user experience. The iPhone, even with its own usability flaws (like the missing copy+paste), has shown that the mobile market of today is about the ease of use, the availability of services, and, of course good marketing and aesthetic design. Nokia’s Symbian OS appears stiff compared to the iPhone interface and Nokia has lost much of its coolness factor. The company that had got used to being almost the one and only is now faced by competition from not just Apple, but Google, Microsoft, and the well-performing Korean manufacturers, Samsung and LG.

So with the new N97 coming out in 2009, the key questions are: does the feature-packed device also pack smooth usability, and how well does it connect with services? Impressive hardware alone will not win back market share for Nokia.

As far as I can tell, the N97 doesn’t use capacitive touchscreen technology, like the iPhone, but has a resistive screen with tactile feedback, like the earlier announced Nokia 5800. That alone is not a major letdown, because the capacitive touchscreen tech also has its cons. It only responds to finger contact and will not work with a gloved hand. The N97 supports gestures, like the iPhone, allowing the same kind of browsing and zooming experience as on the iPhone.

At least in this video, the N97’s new Symbian S60 5th Edition OS looks smooth and the web widgets that can be moved around with the finger to personalize the user’s home screen look like fun. If this is the experience consistently through the phone menus, Nokia may be doing well OS-wise. But what about the services?

Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo boasts that Nokia is rolling out services that “coordinate the world” for the user, “make the mobile Internet experience personal,” and bring social services to the mobile in a way that hasn’t yet been seen. What’s behind Kallasvuo’s words, for one, is the new Point and Find service, which will let users point at landmarks with the phone camera to slurp down location info from the Internet. Read that again. People can point at a building with the phone, and get info about the building. Now that is pretty remarkable, isn’t it, and creates an incredible opportunity for marketers as well. Right now The Point and Find service has a website, or rather just one page with the text “coming soon,” but it is anticipated that the service will become officially available when the N97 comes to stores next spring.

The Google/T-Mobile G1 has the ability to spin Google street-view photos as the user spins. Nokia will obviously top that with Point and Find. But I’m sure it won’t be too long before Nokia’s competitors get similar services out, and that’s what’s so great about the mobile market now. Couple years ago, before the iPhone came out, things seemed a bit stagnated, with Nokia dominating almost everywhere in the world. But now things are happening. There’s also the new ‘Facebook phone‘ that 3/Hutchison Whampoa is launching in the UK that will probably become more quickly popular among real masses than the 500 - 900 euro Nokia N97.

I believe we now have much of the technology, much of the understanding, and much of the user base to be very, very close to a real breakthrough in mobile. The real always-on, always-with-you, social and location-aware Internet experience is coming together.

Tags:   Apple · Google · iPhone · Mobile · Mobile web · NokiaNo Comments.

Crayon Physics is quite an ingenious little video game, in which the player guides a ball to a goal point, not by directly controlling the ball, but by drawing shapes (for example, ramps that allow the ball to roll from one platform to another, or objects that block and “guide” the ball) with the mouse, tablet screen or drawing pad/tablet. Developed by Petri Purho, Crayon Physics Deluxe is now available on the site.

It’s a simple game, but the interface makes it unique. Watch the video on the site to see how engaging it is.

Tags:   Game design · Games · Interaction design · Interface designNo Comments.