Right track, yet behind the curve – VRE Mobile Review

Having purchased monthly tickets since October 2000, at a conservative estimate of over $35,000, I can say that this new-ish app is my preference. Of course, I have always been single-payer, refusing to wrangle with arcane subsidies and split payment voodoo. Yet, the development team omitted some features that should have been obvious priorities for a first release: (1.) First and Foremost: A lock-screen widget that INSTANTLY displays the rider’s choice of default ticket. Alternatively, the app would be set to display that default ticket first thing upon launch. This is CRITICAL for the conductor’s efficiency. The user story for this shouldn’t stretch the imagination (Y’all are an Agile shop, right?). Suffice it to say that seconds, even fractions of a second, matter to conductors who could visually confirm @ three paper tickets per second once their eye’s are trained for the day. (2.) The ticket design wastes too much space on the sprite animation (showing my age), purportedly to aid in counterfeit detection. If I were a conductor, I’d prefer the line and zones to dominate the display, while the animation could be much smaller and still get its job done. And change the colors every month. (3.) Give the Trip Tools area ACTUAL TRIP TOOLS. Simply shelling out to VRE’s web site is a huge disappointment for three reasons: - VRE’s site itself is not well organized to help riders. It’s optimized for marketing and public affairs. - It’s not even the mobile version of VRE’s site (Whoops, you don’t even HAVE a mobile version? tsk, tsk…) - It would conserve VRE’s and riders’ expensive bandwidth to send only raw data (schedule tables, telemetry map, service alerts) without wrapping it in desktop-browser HTML.
Review by PorscheRat on VRE Mobile.