Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Citi Bike makes its kiosks easier to understand, probably



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...

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where's an animated GIF showing a customer repeatedly slamming the bike into the docking station because it won't lock?

Gojira said...

What would really be friendly would be if they removed all those damn kiosks and eyesore bike stands, bikes included.

Anonymous said...

Translation: 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.

Next 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.

Anonymous said...

Hopefully they improve the maps as well. This is something I posted over a year ago: http://jkrweb.com/shelf/?book=userexperience-citibike

Anonymous said...

Too 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"

Anonymous said...

Two students will soon know to copyright their work going forward after not seeing a penny for this work.

Giovanni said...

If only they could make a simple diagram to show CitiBike how to make a profit.

The 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.

Anonymous said...

Since I have a annual pass, I don't notice the kiosks so much.

Speaking 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.

Johnnie Walker said...

Notice how DOT fesses up to its errors once Sadiktator-Khan is gone.

This is just another one of her many failures and debacles.

Anonymous said...

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.

Anonymous said...

The sooner this ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean, the better.

Anonymous said...

This redesign is very good. Very simple to understand...well, except by Anonymous from Aug 20th, 2014@9:18 AM.

Citi 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).

Anonymous said...

Ha, wow, 2:51. Way to be the company shill.

Anonymous said...

They 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.

Makeout said...

I second the GiF idea.