BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

While trying to find a WV trail, I went to the Rail-to-trails conservancy site. I found the experience incredibly frustrating due to bad web desgin (which concerns me) and implementatioin (which concerns me less.)

I sent them this rant (twice, becaue it wasn't clear from their "Contact us" isntruction where the right place to send ti was and because their site is so flaky, it isn't clear that a message is going through anyhow.)

***

Your site has a tremendous amount of data. This data could be, but is not, useful information.

Why not?

1) Inconvenient, flaky, and outright dishonest logins are necessary to see the maps.

a) The logins might provide you with useful information about users. For the user, they change the 40 second task of looking at a map into a painful 15 minute log-in ordeal.

b) A button says "See map" when it should say "Log in to see map." That is, in my opinion, a dishonest spammer's trick. It is not something that would be done by an organization that I would voluntarily give money to.

2) The information on the maps is incomplete in frustrating ways.

a) No indication of where other near-by trails might be. How do you expect me to get there? Not "drive", I hope.

b) Many "Parking" balloons. To the point where the balloons obscures other details. I don't care about parking.

A) & b) together make me think you are geared but to car drivers, not bikers and hikers. If I wanted to drive, I would not be looking at a trail map.

c) No mileage indicators. I had to open another map program to try to figure out what the distances were.

3) Site Flakiness.

a) Are the national maps good? I don't know, they make my browser close whenever I try to access them.

b) The site shut down a few times while I was figuring out I needed to log in to see a map.

c) Logging in took a few tries after that.

IN GENERAL: I would like to donate money to trails organizations, but it appears to me, from your site, that you have decided to put resources into making your facilities less useful. That is, it doesn't appear that the things that prevent your site from being useful are from lack of resources. It looks like someone put time and effort into removing things that would be useful.

Not a good sign.

Mick Young