1. Substitute your window title and URL in the appropriate text layers
2. Run the action for either IE 7 or Firefox 2
3. Get designing!

Rachel Hinman's post on their research reads like a textbook approach to requirements gathering phase, including 2-3 hour interviews, some in-home ethnographies, some in-person interviews with a total of ten people (a combination of type 1 and 2 diabetics and two diabetes educators). I didn't know much about diabetes before I started reading their reports, other than that diabetics have to monitor their insulin levels, usually by pricking their finger with a test device or by using a test strip, and have to add insulin to their bodies to compensate and be able to digest carbohydrates. I had no idea, for example, that most type 1 diabetics come in contact with a needle 10 - 14 times a day (between testing themselves and injecting insulin). I had also never heard of an Insulin Pump, which is an external device, connected to the body via tubing and a cannula implanted subcutaneously (under the skin). Although most of the pumps currently available are big, bulky, and really great examples of industrial design gone bad, their users love them for the control they bring and the positive impact they have on managing their condition. After building an understanding of the day-to-day realities of living with diabetes, and of the current approaches to controlling and managing insulin, the team moved into the design phase (as documented in Dan's post Charmr: Creating Concepts).

The romantic notion of design and designers is that they sit down at a blank white sheet, sketch and draw and create, some magic happens, and a beautiful design is born. Although that's fairly close to the truth, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is actually the blank white sheet itself. Unconstrained design spaces — spaces which have no limits in any direction — are difficult for the mind to grapple with. Questions like Should we make it 100 feet tall? Bright purple? Does it need to fly or swim or make flawless espresso? can destroy your forward motion and lead to designus procastinus: the incredible ability to return phone calls and emails and catch up on mundane tasks in lieu of producing a design. Blank sheets are scary, which is why we always try to go into the design phase with some hard constraints in place. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the more our design space is shaped by the reality of our clients' requirements, the easier it is for us to do our jobs. The design crew at Adaptive started out by extracting six principles from their research:

1. Users had to be able to wear it during sex (elegant, discrete, comfortable)
2. The device had to make better use of data
3. Easy to learn/teach. No numbers (diabetes affects a wide range of people so it has to be simple and downplay numbers in favour of smarter information like status and trending)
4. Less stuff (physically speaking)
5. Keep diabetics in control (no automatic pumps — give people the ability to control what's going into their bodies)
6. Keep diabetics motivated (you never get a day off from your diabetes, so try to have the device keep people motivated to control their condition)

Alexa Andrzejewski takes over from there, describing how her and Dan took that inspiration through design of the user experience, in a post called Charmr: Interaction and Visual Design. Although I lack the understanding to assess how well their concept would work for a diabetic, it looks like they've done a great job of satisfying their six principles (with a possible exception of the first one: I'm not sure how the rubber patch over the pump would live up to being worn during sex from a comfort perspective). There's an Experience Blueprint PDF available (4mb) which sums up the project as a whole, including photos and interface mockups. I think their video speaks does a great job of showing off their design:

Amy was very impressed with the results (see NEWS FLASH: SF Design Firm Unveils the Diabetes "Charmr") and the reaction has been pretty much positive across the board. The point of the exercise wasn't really to create a product specification, so much as it was to lead the manufacturers of devices toward a more user-friendly approach to product design. The Charmr has some critics, particularly ones who have wondered why Adaptive Path didn't apply themselves to solving the problem now rather than in a few years, to which Dan has responded that they felt they would have the most impact leading future products rather than fixing current ones (and I whole-heartedly agree). Our industry has a long history of using our skills to help solve bigger problems, including recent examples like the searches for Jim Gray and Steve Fossett, and more local initiatives like OpenTransit, Zerofootprint, and StartupWeekendToronto's LobbyThem. It's inspiring to see firms use their spare cycles for the power of good, and I encourage firms everywhere to do the same. And yes, before you ask, we're eating our own dog food here too and have a project underway with Zerofootprint which we can't talk about just yet. Stay tuned for more details!

General Secretary and Members of the TTC -

I write as a concerned citizen and lover of Toronto's transit system, inspired by Mr. Joe Clark's weblog post regarding the removal and destruction of signage from the St. George, Pape, Victoria Park, Eglinton, and Islington/Kipling stations (see http://joeclark.org/design/signage/TTC/activism/).

Our city's current renaissance is beautiful to behold but we must not forget that it is founded on a history - albeit a short one - full of people with equal passion and drive to see Toronto flourish. They may be gone but their work is not forgotten and it lives on (and is celebrated) in the intricacies and details of our collective history. Although the signage in those stations may need replacement for reasons of modernization or safety, it deserves to be preserved as part of the rich fabric that makes up the life of our city. Please take this request into consideration as a plea to donate those works to an institution or individual who will protect them with the respect they deserve. Mr. Arthur's papers reside at the ROM - perhaps they might take his St. George signage as well? I'm sure I speak for many of the TTC fans and supporters when I say that I would rather take on the responsibility of preserving one of the signs myself than to see them neglected and in a trash heap.

Thank you for your time!

At any rate, every now and then we stumble across a site that's done something Flashtastic (there we go again! coin, coin, coin) and we felt it was only fair to the Flash developers of the world if we took a moment to point those out too. Make your way immediately to the amazing  Get the Glass site, latest volley in the Got Milk? campaign, and help those desparate Adachis pilot their plumbing van to Fort Fridge to secure The Glass. The site is anything but quick to load, but the thought of molasses made me yearn for a nice cold glass of milk which may have been part of their diabolical marketing plan all along. Many kudos to Swedish firm North Kingdom, who beautifully crafted the experience.

(and a hat tip to Coudal Partners for the link).

Alistair’s Key Awaited Feature List

Hurry Up and Wait

Interface Changes

At first glance the freshened up interface was just wonderful to me. All the palettes have been cleverly compacted into small movable icons which, once you get the knack of them, allow for amazing expansion of your screen real-estate. This is very handy when you are working on the limited dimensions of a notebook. Kudos to the interface designers - if they utilize this front-end for the full CS3 suite, we all will be working happier!

The initial load times are about the same as the CS2 load time on my Intel mac, which means slow, but the similarities stop there. Once inside I am easily zooming and moving around my large files like I am once again working on a desktop rig. Progress bars zip by and wait times are easily cut in half for functions like image loading or running any of the math intensive filters. Layers are flipped and moved about in real-time and gone are the wait times for the layers palette to catch up to what you have been doing.

The only problem I noted was that the type tool seems to crash the beta once in a while, usually when I am flying a little too fast and getting snappy with the mouse. Doing due diligence I checked the forums and found that Adobe has identified this problem and will hopefully correct for the final release.

It would seem that Adobe, for all the griping I have been doing for the last year, is aiming to really please us for our patience. The learning curve is slight and the differences are amazing. With the purchase of Macromedia in the last few years, maybe some of that user driven intelligence has also crossed over, and now Adobe is truly listening to us, and our wants and needs.

New Features

“Zoomify” is a new way to export your larger graphics to the web. Effectively creating a flash file that loads an image and allows you to zoom and move about the pixel eating behemoth with quick load times and high detail. Zoomify is a great way to present your larger print projects to clients over the web without the need for any downsizing of the image, allowing clients to see the full detail of the ad or zoom out to take in your breathtaking layouts. For those of us familiar with working on print, this could be a very beneficial tool to speed things up with your more far off clients.

“Auto Alignment Layers” can remove or add elements from a series of photos you choose to overlay, without having to airbrush for hours to get your desired result. So if you had a few shots of your friends all taken from a similar angle, where in one of your friends wasn't looking at the camera, or not smiling you can use this tool to select the parts of each image you want. Then you can piece them together in almost flawless fashion adding or subtracting to add the smile. For any of us who have tried to paste someone’s face into another photo before, this is a great timesaver, and the final results will look as good as your old-school 4 hours of airbrushing.

"Smart Filters" creates another layer for you to go back and re-edit your filters, so there is no more backing up a spare layer in case you mess up. You can go in and re-adjust the filters after the fact, just like you would a new layer. Clever.

The "Quick Selection" tool allows you to “paint” your selections in realtime by simply holding down the shift key. If the four lattés you gulped down in the morning cause you to accidentally shift out too far past your selection, you simply hold down the option key and gently ease the selection back. The difference between this and the old magic wand is that this tool actually “learns” where you are trying to go. It isn’t just based on just the colours you go over either: it just selects where and how you want it, and feels like magic! You can control the quick select brush size as well, allowing getting in close for much more detailed selection work. Once you have finished selecting what you want, a new refine edge tool allows you to contract or expand, add feathering or tighten up the final selection. For whipping up a fast mockup, or photo montage this tool is going to give you some new found speed.

Speculation for Adobe’s full CS3 Suite release is on or around May 1, 2007.

We were really inspired by our good friend Robert Ouellette's post How Would You Improve The TTC Web Site? and thrilled at the ensuing support and coverage it collected during the first few weeks of the New Year. Some of Toronto's leading blogs leapt to support Robert's cause and quickly asked their readers to provide their ideas in the comments of the following posts:

• Spacing Wire: Help improve the TTC's website
• Torontoist: Help Make the TTC's Website The Better Way
• BlogTO: Bloggers Help TTC Website
• Transit Toronto: Giambrone Turns to Transit Fans for Suggestions

The Press rallied shortly thereafter, providing some pretty good coverage about Adam Giambrone, the TTC's new Chair, accepting Robert's offer and offering to review the feedback. Amongst the radio coverage on AM640 and CBC, the nation's newspapers rang in:

• National Post: Blogtown
• Globe & Mail: The TTC Gets Some Online Help

Here's Where We Come In

Figuring that we know a thing or two about building websites, we thought that we could offer some useful feedback to compliment the already excellent thoughts collecting in the comments on the original blog posts. In addition to our Solutions and Portfolio of experience, we know lots of really smart people who could bring a lot of value to the table. And so we did exactly that and gathered a crack team in Radiant Core's boardroom to scratch our heads and stroke our chins and ruminate on how we could help to better the better way. And what a crew it was! In addition to your intrepid scribe and Michael Glenn, our Architecturally Awesome VP of Technology, we invited (in alphabetical order - ranking a team of this calibre would be impossible in anything but):

David CrowDébonair Developer

David is a passionate advocate for Toronto's technology community. An open community has catalyzed around David in the form of BarCamp, DemoCamp, and the Innovation Commons, reinforcing his belief that openness can spark innovation - "the community is the framework". David is an experience designer, consultant and a software developer.

Joey DeVillaAccordion Articulator

Jose Martin "Joey" deVilla is, among other things: The Thrilla from Manila, based in Toronto, Canada, Technical Evangelist for the web services company Tucows, and a guy who often takes his accordion with him, playing AC/DC, Nine Inch Nails and other pop and rock stuff on it.

Madhava EnrosTTC Guru

Madhava is a Toronto interface/interaction designer who spends, perhaps, too much time thinking about public transit. A dedicated TTC-rider, he has been following Toronto transit planning and policy matters for many years.

Mark KuznickiPolicy Wonk

Mark is a strategy consultant, policy wonk and a TorCamper. Mark's recent policy work includes consulting in cultural policy and in the development of an economic strategy for the entertainment and creative industries cluster. Mark's professional background includes work as a tech startup entrepreneur and in business analysis and tech project management in the financial services industry.

Will PateSocial Media Maven

Will is an all-around web geek: blogger, photographer, videogamer, online community and social media consultant. He's a peopleperson who seeks out technologies to enable self expression, connection, or the creating of meaning.

We really couldn't have asked for a more amazing brain trust. Will captured the moment as we settled in for some serious thinking:

And so we were off and running! Stand back folks, because we really rolled up our sleeves and did some serious analizing.

State of the Union

No one would argue that the TTC currently has a good website. If you've somehow been spared the pain of trying to find information on it, take a few minutes and do your own mini-review now: www.ttc.ca.

Sure, it's ugly and all, but just how bad is it? Here's the quick breakdown using a Radiant Core technique called The Five Thumbs - a quick set of five heuristics that you can use to evaluate any software or website. The Five Thumbs are easy to remember if you know your vowels (just think AEIOU and you'll be most of the way there):

1. Adaptive: a good tool adapts to the user rather than the user adapting to the tool. The TTC's site is very inflexible and forces visitors to do things very much in machine-speak like searching for routes by number rather than by name. The site also doesn't bend when it comes to the format of the information: as Henry Ford might have said, you can have it in any colour you'd like as long as it's a huge PDF or badly formatted HTML.
   
2. Expandable: a good website is easily expanded on by encouraging an ecosystem of third parties to build on a solid foundation. There's no way to get access to the wealth of data behind the site including schedules, stop locations, routes, etc. To make matters worse, the HTML is non-standard and schedules aren't presented in tables but rather spaced out using tab characters in a block of <pre> code, making them hard to parse by screen scrapers and readers.
3. Intuitive: the basic functions of a good tool are easy to figure out with minimal assistance. Given that the basic function of this site is to disseminate information, it's a tangled maze of bad Information Architecture which hides important details in deeply buried pages. Navigation is via HTML <select>s, form controls which are usually reserved for selecting options from a list and can cause problems for screen readers and other accessibility devices.
4. Open: how well does it play with others? We usually measure websites on how well they both render across browsers and validate for standards compliance, as well as how deeply they incorporate accessibility features like tabindexes, accesskeys, alt attributes on images and titles on links, etc. The W3's validators can't get passed the lack of a doctype attribute, though the site does fair somewhat better using Watchfire WebXact, which returns few serious accessibility issues.
5. Usable: how useable is it? This can be a fairly subjective measure, but empirical evidence from the comments left in the original blog posts suggests that users of the site have a very difficult time finding content.

The Better Way

It doesn't take a room full of web-savvy thinkers to come up with a great plan for the Commission's site as the way forward is obvious in many respects. We were pleased to see that the commenters on the original blog posts have thought of many of the same avenues (and even a few that we didn't touch on), so I highly recommend a read through them as well. Our thoughts, in no specific order:

Site Features and Functionality

• Trip planner
  • This one is a no-brainer: give us a tool to figure out the easiest way to get there and we'll ride more often. It's not a very original idea either; a quick perusal of Transit Authority sites will provide a dizzying tour of Trip Planners. Some pretty decent examples:
    • Bay Area
    • Hopstop for NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington
    • London
    • Mississauga
    • Ottawa
    • San Diego
    • Vancouver
  • Google has built a pretty fantastic Trip Planner for Transit on top of their already swell Google Maps: Google Transit. It's meant to be used by Transit Authorities all over the world to provide planning tools for their riders, and it currently provides coverage for nine US cities including Portland (the first city covered), and Seattle. The TTC and Google have been in talks for some time (see The TTC and Google on Spacing Wire from March 2006), though nothing has come of it yet. According to the Toronto Star article mentioned in that post, the Commission costed out its own route planner at $2 million, which sounds like a pretty expensive wheel re-invention to us! We'd like to see the TTC jump on the GT Bandwagon and publish the data in the Google Transit Feed format (see the API points below).
  • Any Planner they do build/use should make an effort to include other Transit Authorities in the area (e.g.: Go, Markham, etc.) in order to provide a seamless experience for the Great Transit Riders of the GTA.
  • Lots of people come to our fair city to visit and make their way around by transit, so it would be a great idea to include some bookmarked destinations and starting points to help them navigate more easily (e.g.: tourist spots, conference halls, shopping, hotels, etc.).
  • Although not required for the first version, mobile access would mean we could do trip planning on the go. Sure, the data rates from Rogers and Bell suck more than your average vampire, but it would give you one more reason to spring for that new iPhone you're all craving.
• Schedules and Route Maps
  • Easily printed route maps as PDFs (no more monolithic files with every route!). People like to carry schedules with them, so make handy-sized ones which we can print out and staple together to keep in our pockets. Better yet, offer schedules for download, pre-formatted for popular hand-held devices. It would also be great if you could add different schedules to a cart and have them packaged into a customized PDF that you could keep on your laptop or print out whenever it gets too dog-eared and weather worn.
  • Trip planners are great for "Get me from A to B" type foresight, but sometimes you just want to know what time the bus goes there and comes back here. The current site makes it fairly hard to find the first part and an exercise in repetition to get the second, so include a link to the opposite direction of travel on all schedules (e.g.: link to eastbound schedule on westbound page).
  • Consider changing the format of the schedules to something a bit more graphical and easy to follow. Nick Provart suggests a pretty good one (see here), an idea which we quite liked and seemed like an emergent de facto standard, but then again, just say Tufte and we're all ears (see pg. 46-47 of Envisioning Information for more information).
  • Each station in the system should have its own page, which can provide information (e.g.: washrooms, vendors/stores in the station, last/first train, bus connections, etc.) and could even be expanded to act as a hub for the community around the station (e.g.: upcoming neighbourhood events via RSS, etc.).
  • The TTC Timeline system was ahead of its time - a phone number for every stop with recorded schedule information - so far ahead, in fact, that it's one of the only real Y2K bugs that we know about. The system was shut down in late 1999 as it become evident that "...the TimeLine system is not Year 2000 compliant and because of the age of the system hardware and other factors, it cannot be upgraded in a cost-effective and timely fashion to allow for its continued use past December 31, 1999." (see TTC Report F591). We'd like to see a return of the Timeline, but this time as an SMS-based service which works by sending your stop ID to a TTC shortcode and getting a schedule update back. The same stop IDs can be used throughout the Schedules and Route maps to remain consistent across the whole system and to make it easy to get schedule info whenever you see an ID.
  • The City of Chicago is running an experimental, GPS-based bus tracker on their #20 line, which gives a hint of what a system like that could deliver. In addition to providing automated recordings of stop announcements on vehicles, it offers the tantalizing possibility of in-stop signage with updated arrival times (à la York Viva system), accurate web-based schedules and maps, and the promise of not having to stand in freezing rain with no streetcar in sight.
• Schedule Updates
  • Include a blog (with RSS feed!) of closures, schedule changes, etc. Use categories to indicate which type of service is being disrupted (e.g.: Subway, Bus, Streetcar) and/or areas of the city affected.
  • Although frequent transit users might get a chance to travel the length and breadth of the system, most of us just wear a groove into our favourite routes. General information about changes is important, but also build the system to allow users to register those routes and subscribe to updates and changes by email, SMS, and RSS.
• Ecommerce
  • It's 2007 and high time that the TTC boarded the eCommerce train! The Metropass Discount Plan is a great idea, but it would be substantially better if we could complete an online form to apply and provide a credit card number to pay for it. Faxing is so 1843 (no, really). There have been rumblings for a while now that the TTC will consolidate with other GTA Transit Authorities on a Smart Card for fares which would negate this, but that might still be a ways off (personally, we're hoping for something like the Octopus Card).
  • Partner with people who produce merchandise that we'll actually buy and build out a great online store to sell it in. We suggest starting with the Spacing station buttons and Torontoist T-shirts, but this city is jam packed with creatives who are just itching to submit their own designs. Take a cue from Threadless and crowdsource the designs to help support our arts scene. And please (please!) spare us the Legacy Sportswear gear which has been passing as Official TTC Merchandise. No offence to them - we're sure they do great work - but stamping the TTC logo onto a catalogue full of generic items isn't what we're looking for.
• Online trip booking for Wheel-Trans. Danny, in the comments on the Spacing original post, tells a horrible tale of trying to make a booking via the antiquated phone system. Wheel-Trans provides mobility to people who would otherwise not have it, and we'd like to see the service made even easier by a full web-integration.
• Multi-lingual Content beyond a pre-canned page of info. We live in one of the world's most multi-cultural cities, a fact that we love to trumpet, and the information on the TTC's website should reflect that. Here's another opportunity for crowdsourcing: post the info in English and provide a translation UI so the community can work its magic.
• TTC API (Application Programming Interface)
  • Open the walled garden and encourage the development of an ecosystem of user-created applications built on the TTC's data (routes, schedules, etc.). Our city is full of tech people who love whipping up new mashups and projects if you just give them the tools, so open the treasure chest and share the wealth. See this great Google Maps/TTC mashup as an example, built by Ian Stevens.
  • Use the Google Transit Feed format, which will likely become a de facto standard for transit data, but make sure its open and available to everyone. Build a system which requires an API key if control over bandwidth costs is a concern (like Google Maps, WordPress, and Flickr to name a few), or use a service like Amazon's S3 to host the feed.
• Build a Web Standards compliant website with no (or almost no Flash). See our blog post, All Flash = Bad, for an explanation on why building all Flash based websites is just asking for a flashtastrophe.
• Navigation
  • Navigation needs to move away from <select>s and into a more logical structure with more accessible controls.
  • URLs for pages should be logical in order to increase ease of navigation (e.g.: http://www.ttc.ca/metropass instead of http://www.toronto.ca/ttc/metropass_steps.htm). Human readable URLs are a great boon for people emailing links to each other, or for people looking through web traffic reports ("Great! 1,235 people visited the page showContent.php?id=27! Now which page is that?" vs. "Great! 1,235 people visited the page content/ttcwebsiteredesign!"). It's also a really good idea to hide the implementation of the site because it means you can more easily change your backend technology down the road without orphaning millions of bookmarks (e.g.: don't end your URLs in .html or .php, but use a feature like mod_rewrite to rewrite URLs from human readable to machine format, so http://www.ttc.ca/metropass/signup gets rewritten behind the scenes to http://www.ttc.ca/metropass/signup.jsp).
• Visual Design and Navigation
  • The People love the TTC font, so use it!
  • How about using some of those fantastic T.O. photobloggers TTC images?
  • Station pages should use their unique tile patterns as visual elements.

Process

• Despite our knowledge of websites and best practices, we weren't able to answer a central question which needs to be covered: who uses the site and what do they use it for? You can't do a good job of building a huge site which is optimized for everyone, but you can do a fantastic job of building highly optimized micro-sites which share designs and content. The City of Toronto does a pretty good job of splitting their content into four basic groups depending on what you want to do (Living in Toronto, Doing Business, Visiting Toronto, Accessing City Hall), and the colour coding makes it easy to keep track of where you are. Once the TTC has answered the central question, it's easier to break the site down into similar groupings and optimize the Information Architecture around goals (e.g.: Frequent Riders, Visiting Toronto, Selling to the TTC, etc.).
• We also ran into an obstacle establishing what the central goal for the website was, other than to provide information. Madhava has an excellent knowledge of the politics and history of the Commission and provided great insight into the fine balance between funding and ridership, which led us to discern that increasing ridership on suburban routes might be an important goal that the website could help to serve (particularly through schedule update subscriptions, SMS Stop Service, GPS tracking, etc.). That's a good start, but we would need more information to really finish a goals analysis.
• Building the site is only part of the battle; maintaining a site of this size and complexity in a healthy manner requires a team of dedicated personnel. The TTC needs to make sure that they build that cost into their budgets, whether the team be internal or outsourced (or some combination). Can we convince the TTC to try a radically different, non-centralized approach to managing the site? Perhaps we can marry the two halves of the brain and have a Community Ombudsperson oversee the marriage between the central authority of the Commission and a community of volunteer web managers and moderators. This doesn't need to go as far as a wiki (although it would be a very good approach!), but there are many happy mediums between a monologue and a full conversation.
• The Community is here to help! Despite what we perceived as an almost tangible antagonism between the Commission and its dedicated Ridership (see Withdraw anagram map lawsuit threat for an example), we still love the Red Rocket and we want to be part of the solution. Use us for our advice and skills and make sure that the process of building the new site is open and transparent. David likes to say that the "community is the framework", and that applies here just as much as it does there. We're riding a wave of new interest in our city and in the grassroots capabilities celebrated by initiatives like the Centre for Social Innovation, so sow some seeds and (to quote Guy Kawasaki intentionally misquoting Chairman Mao), let a thousand flowers bloom.

What's Next?

If you're still reading, we admire your persistence :) A few final thoughts on where we'd like to see this go from here:

• The TTC should re-open the RFP for the Website Redesign. The original RFP closed on Thursday, November 23, 2006 and received responses from a number of traditional web shops (you can find the RFP info by browsing the somewhat confusing and highly frame-based TTC Materials & Procurements site, or by going straight to the otherwise-framed P01DR06363). The Planned Award date is February 1st, 2007 (which recently changed from January 29th), but we think a strong case can be made for the requirements having changed substantial as a result of the change in Commission Chair and the process kicked off by Robert's post - strong enough that the original RFP should be replaced.
• The TTC should completely embrace the community. Soliciting feedback via blogs is a great start, but we'd like to see Adam Giambrone extend that initiative by keeping the rest of this process open and transparent (keep an eye on this space for a forthcoming announcement on this very topic). Collecting feedback in such a public fashion is an amazing step forward and we salute it wholeheartedly! Let's keep moving in the same direction.
• The TTC should set a goal of building the best Transit Authority website in the world. Our former Mayor, Mel Lastman, was perhaps overly found of calling Toronto a world-class city, but he was often right. Even the best Transit websites out there don't set the bar very high and we feel that this is an opportunity to demonstrate our technology and transit leadership by establishing a new watermark.

As always, we look forward to your comments! Help us help the TTC and everyone wins.

1. Flash isn't indexed by search engines. As Patrick points out, Google (and other search engines) don't index the contents of Flash movies. Making your site inside of Flash is like saying that search engine traffic isn't important to you - and I've almost never encountered a site for which that is true (it's definitely not for real estate sites!) There are ways around this but most of them are frowned on and one - presenting a so-called 'doorway' page that delivers an alternate text version of your site when the GoogleBot stops by to index - got BMW and Ricoh's German websites delisted from Google (which is a lot like disappearing from the web). It should be possible to use JavaScript (or a similar technology) to detect whether the Flash plugin is installed and to redirect to an HTML-based version of the site if it isn't, and most search engine bots probably don't report having Flash installed, and they probably won't penalize you for redirecting for all non-Flash visitors rather than just them, but then you're just paying more to build a Flash version and the HTML version you should have built in the first place :).
   
2. Flash breaks the Back button. When you're inside of a Flash movie, the browser still thinks you're on the first page that loaded (i.e.: the one containing the Flash movie and not a frame inside the movie) and so Back will take you to the page before the one you're on (i.e.: not the one with the Flash movie). Back is the second most often used browser control (after links) and jumping out of your movie will annoy your visitors every time they try to use it. It is possible to build Flash movies that use the Back button (see Flash Magazine's Making the back button work for Flash), but it's rarely done (and even less rarely done properly).
   
3. Flash doesn't print. When site visitors print the page containing your Flash movie, they will almost always see an empty rectangle where your beautifully styled movie used to sit. It is possible to make Flash movies that print (see Peach Pit Press' Flash MX Printing sample chapter from Certified Macromedia Flash MX Developer Study Guide), but it's a time consuming extra step that most designers don't consider. I wish it were the case that people never printed off the web, but we know lots of people who do, especially when considering buying a home and wanting the ability to print off different models to show their friends and family.
4. Flash movies have a single entry point. You may have the best looking, most original, all-singing, all-dancing Flash production in the history of the Interweb, but people can only enter from the very beginning. There's no way to bookmark a page inside of your website (e.g.: I can't return directly to the unit I'm thinking of buying), and there's no way for me to send a link to a friend (e.g.: Hey honey! I found our perfect new condo, but you're going to have to navigate through this really complicated Flash movie to find it). For the record, there are some techniques for enabling bookmarking inside of Flash, but they seem to be PC only (e.g.: see Bookmarks in Flash!, although half the comments are spam).

• We could go with a heat map a la Ben Hammersley and I really like what he's done there, though I would maybe keep the font sizing effect for post frequency and use the position and colouring in the grid to indicate post recency.
• We could do a separate tag soup, labelled differently, where sizing indicates most frequently discussed topics from the last week. I'm less a fan of this approach because it requires a second widget with the same appearance but different meaning (up with consistency!).
• We could leave our existing tag soup the way it is but use a second dimension of colour to indicate when posts happened. Using a cool to warm gradient of colours, we could show how "hot" tags are in terms of when they were last posted, with a legend below showing the colours on a timeline. I'm leaning towards this idea most strongly, though I'm not a fan of using colour by itself to indicate something in a UI given the prevelance of colour blindness. We're okay here because it's not essential information and the visitors with colour blindness conditions will see the key incorrectly as well so they might still be able to understand the data.