After a little longer than initially anticipated, the gothere.sg redesign went live this morning, after poor Dominic stayed up coding until 7. It’s not 100% perfect yet, but it’s definitely getting there. There were a lot of cross browser issues (just when you think that different browsers are not an issue anymore), which had us pounding our heads against a wall on more occasions than one. But all in all, we are quite pleased with what we came up with. And knowing the passion and dedication of the people at Gothere you can be sure there’s loads more to come within the next few months. Trust me.

Our main focus with the redesign was, this time, just to give a facelift. We have lots of ideas for the future, but this time we tried to focus primarily on just making it look a little nicer, but to keep the basic, simple functionality of the existing design. We wanted to make it a little more playful, adding some colours, giving it some more contrast with different font sizes and also introduced a new set of icons, based on the logo.

Anyway, we’ve not only redesigned the website, but are also in the process of developing a whole new brand identity for gothere. The new logo looks like this:

The symbol element of the logo is the lowest common denominator for the visual identity. Although the main brand colour is green (for go, green light), the icon can come in virtually any colour, depending on context. The empty space inside is to be filled with other symbols or photos to serve as icons, stickers or anything else. The symbol is simple yet visually easily recognizable, rounded to portray openness and friendliness, and it helps convey the gothere brand value keywords of boldness, passion and simplicity.

All in all, I’m happy to have been a part of helping one of Singapore’s most indispensable services websites / tools become a little friendlier and easier on the eyes.

There will be much more to check out at gothere.sg soon, so stay tuned to the gothere blog.

Now go find some directions.

After emailing the Deputy Director for Public Transport Promotion Division of LTA about two weeks ago, I gave him a call on friday last week. Not that I think I came across as a brilliant phone person myself, but he said that they haven’t even gotten started on the journey planner yet(!), and all in all he seemed very reluctant to get help from any outsider. I guess I’ll bug him again in a month’s time or so, just to be obnoxious.

In other news; I’ve teamed up with the people at gothere.sg to help them develop a new overall design and brand identity to the gothere brand. It’s very exciting, they are brilliant and passionate people, with a great service, and working with them is loads of fun. Although the logo and most of the brand is done, the website is taking longer than anticipated to put together. Hopefully something will be live in about a week and a half or so.

More on this later.

I wasn’t prepared to get so much (if any) response to the things I posted on thursday, and though I’m thankful I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t spend more time on my sketches.

Anyway, Daniel over at Singapore’s Land Transport, pointed me in the direction of the new tender to redesign the bus stop poles, so with his help I was able to find the actual design that will be implemented (subject to changes, naturally). And it was fun to see that I wasn’t completely off the mark, although the visuals provided in the tender were more thorough than mine. The new ones are actually really good. I can’t link directly to the file, so for details on the tender, go to  GeBIZ, click on Tenders & Quotations, and then search for Signcraft Installations. They fix most of the problems I’ve had with the current ones, although, I can’t help but to poke around a little bit and make some modifications to them.

This is what they’ll look like (theirs to the left, my modifications to the right):

As you can see, the new stop pole is about 1000 times better than the old one. Now for my modifications.

A. It seems the LTA is fixed on making the bus stop code the biggest and most prominent part of the stop (second to the public transportation logo on the right side). Why? How many people currently know the bus stop code of the stop nearest to them? Also, this code is not very prominent in other pieces of information design around public transportation. It’s not on the Bus Services guide, it’s not in signs in the MRT showing the way to the nearest bus stop… The only places that has them is the online journey planners and the transit link book. So, obviously, it should be smaller.

B. Instead they’ve made the actual name of the stop (which is prominent on the bus services guide, for instance) almost illegible, and especially if you were to be on the bus. Upsize, please!

C. I implemented my idea of separating the night rider buses from the “normal” ones. Since they don’t run all the time, they should stick out a little.

The biggest problem with this current tender, that I see, however, is that it only covers the actual pole. This may not mean, however, that the LTA doesn’t have plans to look into the design of the rest of the stop, but still, these should definitely be overhauled at the same time. I modified my old sketches and implemented the new design, but kept some of my original ideas:

Especially, I combined my idea for the simpler “via” information tables with the current “Real-time bus information” panel released earlier. I frankly don’t see the point of having the arrival times of the two next buses visible (when the first one isn’t very accurate for starters). Instead, make that sign more usable by

1. Providing information of what buses populate the stop, in big type that is legible from the street or across it.
2. Showing a couple of “prominent” stops that the buses stop at on their way to their termination stop

Here’s a better picture:

That’s all for now. There also have been some developments on the front of the journey planner, especially since TransitLink released their updated version on Friday. Compare that one to the one at GoThere.sg, just for kicks. GoThere may not have in their own words, the most “pleasing” design, but it does its job extremely well (at least during the time I’ve played with it), and it’s vastly superior to anything else that I’ve found. TransitLink has really taken the complete reverse approach, making something that is basically as complex and difficult to use as possible.

More on this later.