We’re delighted that the CycleStreets Mobile web site has been judged one of the “Best Application Designs”, by renowned web usability guru, Jakob Nielsen!
The mobile site was one of the winners in the Lightweight Applications category. You can read the report announcing the winners on his site, and a fuller downloadable report is available (for a fee).
The site is a small-screen version of our main site, and is intended to work on a range of mobile devices, such as iPhone, Android, modern Blackberry devices and more. (We haven’t quite got full compatibility for Windows Phone 7.5 Mango yet, but if you can help, do contribute to the codebase.)
As the report outlines, our aim with producing a mobile web browser app was to enable quick and simple planning of journeys on a small screen, offering the key functionality of CycleStreets with a minimum of fuss, a quick download time, and providing clear large buttons. We were able to include much of the usability learning from the main site and the iPhone and Android apps in creating the site, and as such it includes many of the best elements of each of them. For instance, there is a quick way to switch routes directly and to see the details of the route without going to a different screen. Also, the crosshairs concept enables quick and accurate planning and avoids problems with large fingers obscuring the start/finish points.
The site was created by Anna Powell-Smith, who we’d like to congratulate! We’d also like to thank Tom Steinberg of MySociety whose insight into one key aspect of the app really helped improve it.
