Dublin Bus: an unexpected example of good user experience design

 – posted August 31st, 2008 by Brian Donohue     Comments (4)

Have you seen the new Dublin Bus “street furniture”? Did the differences catch your attention?

Sign showing route numbers

Walking up Parnell Square last week, not only did the new signs grab my eye, but I stopped to read this surprising notice:

\

Wow! This was surprising for a couple of reasons:

  • The fact that Dublin Bus did “a major piece of customer research” to guide how they should design their new street furniture.
  • The fact that they were proud enough and cared enough about it to actually promote their process.

Here’s the rest of their notice:

The sign includes lots of details about the new notices, including the fact that they\'re bigger signs so they can use larger fonts.

I doubt many people will bother reading signs that have a heading of “Information Design”. (Though if you’re bored at a bus stop, you might read anything!)

But that doesn’t matter - not one bit. Because the info in that sign is really only interesting to those of us in the UX and design industry.

What matters is the result

I think this big piece of work from Dublin Bus is a huge success. Why?

  • I can spot where the bus stops are from a distance
  • I can easily figure out which buses use that stop, also from a distance. No more need to go up to the stop and give that cylinder timetable a spin.
  • The details about the routes are clear and useful (see image below).

Shows the timetable and route of the bus.

Will customers notice? And will they care?

Well it’s certainly hard not to notice the change, but it’s pretty unlikely to be much of a conversation piece amongst the punters.

I think this is a prime example of good design being invisible. After a day or two, everyone will forget what the old signs used to look like. And they won’t really notice that these new signs are doing a good job — they can get what they need painlessly, which is what they’d expect. It’s only bad design that would really get people talking. It’s only if Dublin Bus messed up this redesign that they’d really hear about it.

So kudos to Dublin Bus, and here’s hoping they extend this impressive design work to their woeful website.

Any other thoughts on whether Dublin Bus got this one right?

Categories Design, Spotted

Comments Closed | Trackbacks Off | permalink