Metro Goes Interactive

Metro has officially launched the first phase of what it calls its “interactive video wall”, or Metro Interactive. Currently the site features various videos intended to “help customers and visitors more easily navigate Los Angeles”. It is also the new home of Metro Board Chair Pam O’Connor’s infamous online chats. Future plans for the site include: blogs, polls, user uploads, and live streaming video. Metro views Metro Interactive as “a tool to help us reach out to our customers”. Let’s see how phase one fares with this discerning customer.

First Impressions

Thankfully, Metro decided to go with a unique domain (or at least a subdomain) with Metro Interactive. Unlike Miss Traffic, which was hidden three directories deep in the Metro site, Metro Interactive can be reach by simply typing multimedia.metro.net into your web browser. Doing so will lead you to a site with the clean visual design that has been successfully standardized throughout Metro. Bold colors and imagery on a clean grid are complimented with the serious but friendly Scala Sans font. The header pays homage to the silhouettes of th now iconic iPod advertisements, portraying an image of a person holding a video camera. The site seems a little barren, with a sizable chunk of empty space in the top right corner, but keep in mind that this is the first-phase. Plus, less-is-more is always a good philosophy when it comes to design. One strange visual flaw is an unnecessarily low resolution Metro logo at the top of the page.

Content

First up is Huell Howser’s Ten Great Reasons To Ride. I’ve long been a fan of Huell Howser, he just seems to be genuinely (if overly) excited about everything that it’s hard not to like him. This time he’s gotten behind the concept of ridesharing, and he’s joined with Metro to create a series of clips to promote the concept. In the clip Huell Howser’s Ten Great Reasons To Ride , Huell vies for the Miss Transit crown as he interviews various Angelenos and lists his top ten reasons to share the ride. It’s watchable in classic Huell Howser style, he approaches random people on the streets and somewhat awkwardly but always honestly presents them with questions. It’s always nice to see regular Angelenos talking about public transit. My problem with the video is that it’s just too long for an internet video. We of the YouTube generation are used to quick bite-size clips and extended videos (television… ew) get really boring really fast. I know it’s not necessarily Huell’s style, but the videos need to be faster paced. The same goes for the other Huell video on Metro Interactive: Tales from the Fast Lane. The interviews, while filled with interesting tid-bits, could benefit greatly from a good editor.

In the Videos section of Metro Interactive, there are four categories: “Go Metro to…”, “News & Features”, and “Safety Tips”. The “Go Metro to…” videos should be familiar to anyone who has seen any Transit TV, they are short advertisements produced by Metro that promote various hot spots that are easily reached by Metro. The videos would benefit from some higher production values, they don’t quite fit into the aesthetic standards set by the rest of Metro’s visual design. Perhaps they could use some transit oriented motion graphics (ahem) to spice things up. My main problems with these videos however is that the information they provide is very minimal. They need to have a comprehensive list of the various transit routes and stops that serve the various destinations. Simply saying you can get to Hollywood and Highland by the Red Line is not enough, since not everyone lives near the Red Line and since there are many other ways to get there. The “News & Features” video section offers Metro public relations clips about things like vanpooling and bikes on Metro, and strangely a video for the Skirball Center which probably belongs in the “Go Metro to…” section. The bikes on Metro video offers very little value, it just tells you that you can brings bikes on Metro but doesn’t get any deeper than that. Overall, this section is quite useless. The “Safety Tips” video section contains two videos, one aimed at children and the other is a short but interesting clip about how bus drivers train. The children’s video about safety near light rail lines was actually quite enjoyable, and seemed a pretty effective way of getting the message across, I’d actually like to see more of these.

The Live Chat section has a few links to forms where you can submit questions to Pam O’Connor for upcoming online chats, as well as archives of previous chats. The Metro Speaks section is even more minimal, offering a link to a PDF about booking a speaker from Metro and an email link.

Transit Takes has the potential to be interesting. Supposedly, each week Metro will hit the streets (or rails as the case may be) and interview passengers with a single question. The current question is “What do you like about ridesharing?” and each answer is accompanied by a picture of the Metro Rider. It’s a fun idea, and a nice way to get to know your fellow Metro Riders. We’ll see if it gets updated weekly.

The last section, Feeds, has a link to the Metro Library’s Transportation Headlines Blog (which I consult daily) and a link to Metro’s destination podcasts (which I’ve never consulted).

Usability

So the content on Metro Interactive is not the best, but it’s not the worst either. There’s not much there right now, but it does have the potential to be kind of cool if the video quality is improved and they get an editor to chop things up a bit to pick up the pacing. The usability of the site leaves a lot to be desired. Things that should be clickable, like headlines, aren’t. A number of the links, while having different descriptions and being separated on a list, point to the same destination, which is just redundant and stupid. Worse yet, when you go to a page in a section, say a destination video, there’s no way to get back to the home page other than using your browsers back button. That’s just bad web design. In a similar vein, there’s no way to get to the Metro.net homepage from Metro Interactive. Perhaps the biggest problem is that despite the name, the site is far from interactive. In today’s web of blogs, social networking, and instant feedback… email forms just aren’t going to cut it. We want to leave live unmoderated comments on videos, we want to know who else is reading and who is writing, we don’t want the entire page to reload every time we click something new. As it stands now, Metro Interactive is stuck deep inside Web 1.0 in a Web 2.0 world.

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design • first impressions • huell howser • interactive • metro interactive • publicity • videos • web 2.0 • website