Usability! It's (Not) Everywhere!

When I first moved to New York over 20 years ago, the city gloried in its lack of user-friendliness. Basic facts about getting around, finding the goods and services you needed and even keeping out of danger were treated as state secrets, or at the very least, badges of initiation, separating the cool knowing people in New York from the mouth-breathing yokels in New Jersey and points west. New Yorkers in those days vacillated between wanting show off their hard-won insider knowledge and wanting to keep it from others, who hadn't yet paid their Gotham dues. As a result, they had a tendency to answer requests for information either with over-eager explanations or Delphic ambiguities.  How do you read all those parking signs so as to avoid a ticket? Why do you need a car? In which neighborhoods can you rent an apartment without investing in window gates? Wait and see. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.

In those days, much of the city's signage seemed to be more valued for its emotional expressiveness than actual utility.

In the years since, some things have gotten better. Subway maps are now on platforms and inside cars. The MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) did two very good things for people who want to navigate its approximately 656 miles of subway and more than 300 separate bus routes:

1. They released MTA-approved mobile apps for navigating public transit.
2. They let people who didn't work for the MTA conceive, design and build them. 

A few months ago the unthinkable, "is this New York?" holy grail of usability happened: New York Redesigned its infamous parking signs, whose lack of readability was such a revenue boon to the city in years past. At the unveiling of the new signs transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan called the old ones  “a cross between an Excel spreadsheet and a totem pole.” So usability is even creeping into the most defiantly user-unfriendly metropolis in America. Of course, you still can't buy or re-up your MetroCard (NYC Transit pass) anywhere near most bus stops. Good to know  some people in charge are still fighting under the old motto of "damn the passengers, full speed...actually forget that part about full speed, just damn the passengers, OK?" 

In time, I suppose that will change too. Then I'll have to move.