Saturday, March 29, 2025
The TfL website last underwent a thorough design upgrade in 2014 and hasn't changed much since, template-wise. But times move on, not least the increased necessity for accessible responsive design, so a change is arguably long overdue. And here we go...
I think it's just the one main page so far - the Tube, Overground, Elizabeth line, DLR & Tram status page, i.e. tfl.gov.uk/tube-dlr-overground/status. It's gone big, it's gone narrow and it's got an awful lot of white space all over it. It is of course optimised for smartphone usage, where it looks quite swish and scrolls down smoothly with all sorts of additional information opening up if you touch the screen. It works less well on anything landscape, like my laptop screen, where information that used to be visible in one glance is now too large to fit.
I see I complained about precisely this back in 2014.
The key difference is that TfL's new website has been designed with smartphones in mind. Text links have been replaced by buttons that are easier for chunky fingers to push, and the layout of pages is mostly portrait rather than landscape. For those out and about with a mobile device the design will be more intuitive, whereas those at home with a computer screen should expect more white space and more scrolling.
And I'm complaining again. As is so often the way the laptop/desktop experience gets worse when the mobile experience gets better, because designers never seem to include platform-responsive formatting or the ability to tweak the layout somehow. "We think this is better for you" is their watchword even when it patently isn't, "so this what you're getting".
In bad news TfL appear to have fully given up on including a map of disruptions on their website, copping out with an instruction to use the TfL Go app instead. Forcing users off one device onto another is never an accessibility plus. I understand that coding such a map is difficult, or maybe just expensive, but it's truly galling that we will never again see a pictorial disruption map online, only a less helpful list of atomised bits.
Other changes are lovely, like the summaries of line closures using endpoints and arrows, also the graphic depiction of future disruption over the upcoming week. And other changes are frustrating, like the list of affected stations which appears in alphabetical order rather than most serious incident first, and where 'part closure' has suddenly been given undue prominence.
We've seen pages using a similar template for several years in the Board Meetings section of the TfL website but it looks like this is the beginning of changes on pages people actually use. Look out for further sequential metamorphosis as things you've got used to disappear and things you'll soon love magically arrive. I'm pretty disappointed so far though.
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