Citi Bike stations around the city are getting a new, user-friendly design.
This past winter, Citi Bike served as a client for first-year SVA students in MFA Interaction Design. Their challenge: "come up with ways to make Citi Bike more user-friendly for its hundreds of thousands of new and casual riders."
As the Citi Bike Tumblr explains, the proposals were so impressive that they decided to work with two of the students "to bring their work out of the classroom and into the streets."
We spotted the revamped visuals at several East Village docking stations last evening, like this one on East Second Street and Avenue C...
Where's an animated GIF showing a customer repeatedly slamming the bike into the docking station because it won't lock?
ReplyDeleteWhat would really be friendly would be if they removed all those damn kiosks and eyesore bike stands, bikes included.
ReplyDeleteTranslation: The first time around a well connected (and kick-back paying) "agency" did the work. They didn't actually test the copy/design on real people... so it sucked.
ReplyDeleteNext they went to cheap labor (poor starving students who don't know better) and got something that is (hopefully) better.
If they had done this in the first place they could have saved the original concept/design/production fees.
Nice how your money is spent.
Hopefully they improve the maps as well. This is something I posted over a year ago: http://jkrweb.com/shelf/?book=userexperience-citibike
ReplyDeleteToo bad they dont also show instructions on what not to do on the bike: "Ride against traffic" "Ride on the sidewalk" "Run red lights without caution" "Ignore pedesterians crossing the street"
ReplyDeleteTwo students will soon know to copyright their work going forward after not seeing a penny for this work.
ReplyDeleteIf only they could make a simple diagram to show CitiBike how to make a profit.
ReplyDeleteThe next student assignment should be for SVA students to design a poster that stops drunk yunnies and sorostitutes from mistakenly jumping into every black SUV which happens to be stopped at a red light just because they think it's an Uber car. Accidentally kidnapping drunk kids has never been this easy.
Since I have a annual pass, I don't notice the kiosks so much.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, I'm going to renew today, for both me and my wife, at the same price we paid last year. You really can't beat it.
Notice how DOT fesses up to its errors once Sadiktator-Khan is gone.
ReplyDeleteThis is just another one of her many failures and debacles.
The contract with the new company to take over CitiBike was supposed to be finished weeks ago, now we hear that annual renewals are way down, so what happens if the deal falls through? All this good work by SVA students will have just gone to waste.
ReplyDeleteThe sooner this ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean, the better.
ReplyDeleteThis redesign is very good. Very simple to understand...well, except by Anonymous from Aug 20th, 2014@9:18 AM.
ReplyDeleteCiti Bike is here too stay and this amenity is very useful. Hopefully, the program will improve with time but it is very usable (unless you can't read like an above Anonymous).
Ha, wow, 2:51. Way to be the company shill.
ReplyDeleteThey can redesign the kiosks, the bike lanes, the docking stations, the bikes themselves, whatever, of this "alternatvie mode of transportation", but it will still and always be a self-illusion of selectivity and for the culture of numbness.
ReplyDeleteI second the GiF idea.
ReplyDelete