
The Big 5.0: Transit app gets a makeover - anguswithgusto
https://medium.com/@transitapp/the-big-5-0-transit-gets-a-makeover-eb169ecee240
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SllX
Discovered this app quite by accident a number of years ago, and after eyeing
its competition, settled on this one to recommend to people.

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.

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stephencoyner
Functionally, the redesign is pretty badass. The gesture navigation is
intuitive and well executed. They've placed the live bus locations in a more
prominent position which is awesome.

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.

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dvtrn
The clashing colors help out a lot more than you may think. I can easily
filter out, in a city like Chicago exactly what I need filtered out. Walking
to the L on Diversey? I only care about the red line, despite being in range
of a brown, pink and purple line. I scroll til I see red, bam. 10 minutes. I
got time to slide into 7/11 for a soda pop.

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.

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stephencoyner
I agree color can have powerful meaning and help relate the app to the real
world. My point was more the use of color in the app seems dated. There's many
ways they could make the app feel more modern while retaining color as a way
finding method.

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.

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dvtrn
Dated in what way? Merely curious.

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

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stephencoyner
To me it feels like material design 1.0 - when every Android app had a bunch
of bright colors in rectangle shapes.

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.

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egypturnash
Don’t judge it while sitting on your butt with enough time to type out
multiple paragraphs about how it could be more restrained. Judge it when you
are leaving the office a little late and want to know if you can catch your
bus if you hustle _right now_.

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.

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stephencoyner
Giant blocks of color wont help me differentiate the 31 and the 31bx that are
both offered by MUNI in San Francisco. But the giant 32pt type helps me do
that.

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

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Svexar
Doesn't mention Transit's widget which is its greatest feature. I love that I
can get bus/train arrival times without opening an app. It automatically
populates with the nearest bus lines and you can tap it to switch directions.

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iampims
I used to _love_ this app, but lately (~1 year) it's been buggy and not
refreshing the bus schedule (SF) properly and giving me garbage info – which
is worse than no info at all.

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xenadu02
They seem to have a stale data problem; in an effort to never show you an
empty app, they fallback to the transit schedule or whatever they last pulled
from the server while they seem to be waiting for the refreshed data to
download.

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)

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iampims
That’s exactly the behavior I’m seeing. I’ve missed countless buses and trains
because of it.

The new design isn’t helping much at all.

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rcMgD2BwE72F
I'd love to read ideas for improving the design of Transportr, a FOSS public
transport app for Android
([https://github.com/grote/Transportr](https://github.com/grote/Transportr))

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ant6n
Why does it ask you to select your network. The phone has gps, it should
already know where you are.

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thatswrong0
Love the usability / intuitiveness of this app. My only qualm is that the drag
down to go back isn't _always_ available.. for example, if I select a "Ford
GoBike" location, I have to tap the "X" in the top right to go back, which is
a bit of a reach on an iPhone. But that's pretty minor complaint.

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donarb
A double tap on the home button will push the screen halfway down, allowing
easy one-handed access to top buttons with your thumb. That gesture has been
in iOS for years.

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genmon
Anyone use both Transit and Citymapper and able to say how they compare?

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hadrien01
I much prefer Citymapper. It's less buggy (I lose the current directions at
least once per direction with Transit...) and much faster (searches, times).
It also displays where you should be in the train so you can get out faster.
But in the city I currently live, only Transit exists

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antijava
I tried both for a while. I liked The Citymaper UI better, but Transit
actually shows the live position of the bus. Transit wins. This is with VTA in
Santa Clara, California.

