T offering mobile alerts
You're late for work, there's no sign of the bus and you're wondering if should you call your boss. Your cell phone may be the answer.
The MBTA has a new mobile website that puts service updates within reach of your phone, showing how late buses and trains are running, and why.
"I was very excited," to see the new site, said freelance designer Kristen Crusius. Crusius said she uses the T constantly, and often uses her cell phone to "find her way around."
However, the mobile site does not offer Trip Planner, a popular mbta.com feature that maps out a door-to-door transit route using the rider's start and finish addresses.
That is disappointing, Crusius said.
"The T is currently exploring whether this, as well as the mapping feature, could be added to the site," said spokesman Joe Pesaturo.
MBTA website contractors are also working to make train schedules available to riders, and make bus schedules more navigable, Pesaturo said. "There are limitations as to what can be done."
The experts weigh in
BostonNOW contacted a bus rider and a subway rider at Watertown-based internet consulting firm Molecular, Inc. to review the mobile version of mbta.com.
Bus Rider
Name: Margaret Wong
Experience Design Specialist, Molecular, Inc.
"Overall it was fairly straightforward to use. As far as the (bus schedule), there were a lot of lines of time to scroll through. I would have preferred to see for each route, just the starting destination time and ending destination time, for ease of scrolling/scanning, and then have the option to expand the specific route time I actually wanted to see."
Subway Rider
Name: Karen Lin
Experience Design Specialist, Molecular, Inc.
"For the most part they've done well with chunking out manageable pieces of information, especially for the high level pages, but I just tried to do a search on finding the schedule for the Green Line from Copley Square. The only information I could find was a PDF schedule. I open it to find that it is unreadable and scrolls on and on with information that I can't make sense of."