State-of-the-art analysis

Reskollen

There is no official mobile application for travelling using SL for the Android operating system. Instead there are a large number of inofficial applications. The one with the highest rating in the Google Play Store is Reskollen, published by KTH student Mårten Wiman.

When starting the application, the first screen displayed show the next departures from the station closest to you, together with the distance to the station. This information is updated in real time. This screen also display the delays of every vehicle.

In the same way as the bus stop signage, the application distinguish between the information gathered in real-time and the scheduled times by display minute counts for real-time information and exact time for scheduled times. I really like this design concept, since my most common usage when travelling is my commute to and from school, meaning I already know what line to take. In this case, I’m only interested in the times of the next departures.

Another neat feature is that is contains its own built-in travel planner. The built-in planner also works when offline, something I’ve found very useful when in the subway, where data coverage is scarce. I’ve also found the planner to be more intelligent than the one provided by SL.

My favourite feature of the application is the ease of use - one notice that a lot of time has been spent in making the application easy to use. For example, on the main screen where the next departures are displayed, there are also two text fields shown - from and to. When two locations are entered into these fields, the application will immediately display the next trips between the locations starting now. This is probably the most common use case, and displaying it so prominently and automatically searching for trips when the locations are entered minimize the number of presses needed to get the information I want - a design philosophy that seem to permeate the application.