Now I do my banking with RBC, and have signed up to use their online banking. I don’t want to make this a Canada vs. America thing (though it is all too easy given that the country names are right there as part of the bank), but I can only conclude that this is yet another reason why America is better than Canada (USA! USA! USA!). The other two are Amazon and pizza.

It’s about the time of the month when I have a batch of bills that come due, and I always dread logging in and trying to navigate the wonky interface to accomplish this really simple task.

I think that the opening page is a pretty good indication of the experience you’re in for when you try to use this service:

So far so good, right? Awesome. A reasonable person would expect that the kind of things that belong in this menu are actions, things you’d want to do, things that the helpful RBC internet elves could assist you with, maybe signing in to banking, getting in touch with a representative, finding a branch.

Or, apparently, this is Canadian – English for “What Country is Your Account In?”

While you can do quite a lot within the service, it seems less like a designed system and more like a mish-mosh of different functionalities and modules held together with spit and duct tape. There’s a lot of jumping around and between different interfaces and areas of online banking and never any clear sign of where you are (or how you’ve got there and how you can get back). This is an especially scary thing for an online banking site. With no clear path back, I use the browser back button (which is somewhat of a no-no in web apps) and inevitably end up getting asked if I want to send the form again. Until I check my balance, I’m never quite sure if I’ve ended up sending Fido (my mobile carrier) twice what I owe them. And even sending them once what I owe them pains me because that’s already more than it’s worth.

A game that I like to play is called “Nest the Tabs” I click around for a while and see how many nested tab navigation menus I can rack up. My record in this game is four:

Pretty good, huh?

Perhaps the biggest flaw with the service is its flakiness. Most sessions end not with my logging out but with an error message like this:

… which is so frustrating! It’s not temporary if it happens over and over again, and there’s no information on this page that tells me why the error happened or what I can do to resolve it or better yet, avoid running into it again.

It’s bad enough to receive this kind of error and lose your work flow if you’re checking email or uploading photos … but when your finances are at stake, it can be truly terrifying! What if this happened in the middle of a funds transfer? Not only are the effects of this acute, but it also contributes to a general mistrust of the system, and thus the company as a whole.

Speaking of triathlon training, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch + heart rate monitor last summer, and it’s proved to be a really valuable tool in supporting me in my training. Interestingly enough, this product came out at the end 2005, and an updated (the 405) was released in 2007. But the reviews for the newer version were quite middling, with many people quoting the flakiness of the software and the fact that the touch-sensitive bezel misfires when you sweat and is difficult to use while active. Duh. Who would have thought that one would sweat while exercising. The 305’s honkin’ huge, but other than that, I can’t say I have any real complaints about its performance. It gets the job done quite effectively, whether I’m running along the river or on a hike in Kannanaskis.  The only issue I find with it is the extensive nested configuration menus. Stuff isn’t always where I expect it to be. And trying to find a setting when I’m doing something else (running, for example), proved to be impossible.

A couple weeks ago, I was running 200m repeats around a track. I had previously set my watch to automatically trigger a new lap every mile, but now I wanted to time each lap separately, without it automatically resetting every mile (which would inevitably somewhere in the middle of a lap). So as I’m running, I’m digging into the menus, and for the life of me, I cannot find this freakin’ autolap setting to shut it off! Is it in “Settings->General->Display” … or perhaps “Settings->Fields->Units” … wait, this menu looks familiar, was I just here?!? To make a long story short, it took me about four laps after I’d realized what was going on before I was able to find this setting and turn it off.

So I was thinking about contextual awareness, and how this experience could have benefitted from the device leveraging this information. The Motorola Droid knows when you’re in your car, and it knows when you’re sleeping (it does not, however know when you’ve been bad or good. That comes as part of Android 4.0 a.k.a. Raspberry Bear Claw).  Seriously, what more information could this watch know about me?!?: It already knew my heart rate, where I was , how fast I was going, and what training regimen I was on! Talk about the ultimate contextually aware device!

What would an interface adapted to my current context look like? Well, to be fair, the device already does a bit of this: it changes the display depending on if you’re biking, running or other-ing, though it’s something that the user has to manually specify. But if it knew I was in motion, maybe it could shave out some of the excess settings and only give me access to the kinds of things I may want to do/edit during an actual workout. Turning on/off autolapping may not be at the top of that list of use cases, but there’s a whole lot that could be safely hidden with the justification that these are probably things you’d never want to do while actually exercising (e.g. change the time and date).

Surprisingly, my anger wasn’t directed at the network for being slow or at Parallels for taking entirely too long to boot up or shut down. It wasn’t because I lost work, because my computer inexplicably froze up on me or forced me to restart because it had some updates to install.It was at a piece of software I explicitly elected to use, though there were other options available. And, perhaps most surprising of all, this piece of software is from Apple, who’s products I generally find enjoyable to use.

I am fucking pissed at iMovie ‘09.

I needed to do some editing of a video I shot for a tutorial. A colleague of mine suggested using a product called Ultra Video Splitter from company called Aone; my e-mail esponse to him was this:

Thanks, Xxxx – I’m probably going to take a shot at it using iMovie – as it’s software I’ve been meaning to learn how to use for quite a while and this would be the perfect opportunity! I’ll let you know what I come up with ……

Dan

It’s true; I’d never used iMovie before, mostly because I never had a reason to have to use it. And here was the perfect opportunity. I’ve had good experience with Apple products in the past, and I didn’t mind investing time in learning a tool that could potentially come in handy in the future. Besides, Apple sh*t is cool, right? Way cooler than some Windows shareware app.

The good part, is that within about half an hour of clicking around, after hovering over buttons to bring up tooltips and countless Apple-Zs, I knew my way around the interface and had a good mental model of how all the parts fit together. Apple tends to be very good at designing simple, learnable interfaces with plenty of scaffolding to enable first-time users like myself to find their way around.

My goal was very simple. To comb through about 45 minutes of video, splice out ~20 interesting clips, and make a separate video file out of each. I went through the video, Favorite-ing about twenty sections and made ‘clips’ out of them to add to my movie. All without looking at a single sentence of an instruction manual. Bravo to me for being so smart, and kudos to Apple for building an application which requires zero instruction for a newbie to get up and running.

But from here, things went downhill. Fast.

First off, I realized that I couldn’t only export one clip at a time.  You’re only able to export the whole movie (i.e. the sum of all the clips plus whatever transitions are in between them). This was kind of confounding, and I spent a bit of time Googling around before resigning myself to a wonky workaround: duplicating my twenty-clip project twenty times, and then deleting all but one clip in each of the projects, so that when I export, I got just one clip in the movie. *Sigh*.

My test case then was to just create one duplicate project with one clip, and to see how the resultant video came out. To my dismay, I found that the video I was exporting was of significantly lower quality than the source. Back to the Google. Without knowing too much about video editing and codecs, from what I read, In concluded that this is is just apparently the way iMovie works, nothing I can do about it.  But I would be taking these video clips and using them in a Camtasia presentation, which would compress them even more, so starting with degraded-quality clips was not an option. Time to check out the other application recommended by my colleague. *Sigh*.

One issue though – I’d spent about three hours going through the video and hand-selecting the bits that I needed, and I didn’t want to have to go through the video again in another program and repeat this laborious process. Surely there must be some way to export the chapters I’ve created or information about the Favorites I’d earmarked? File -> Export? Hello? Share? Where are you, menu item?!? I tried ‘Export to Final Cut XML’ or something and the xml  file which was produced didn’t seem to have units or tags that I could make any sense of. Fair enough – that one was kind of a stretch. But still …. *sigh*.

Looks like I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Here was my plan: I was going to take out a piece of paper (there must be some around here somewhere) and some kind of writing instrument, and record onto the paper with the writing instrument, the time, in seconds, that each one of these clips starts and ends. Then, with this presumably inferior recommended software open, I would then take aforementioned piece of paper, read back the numbers, and create a parallel set of clips within the new software, then export these to seperate videos. Simple, right? A pain in the ass, sure, and a waste of time, sure, but what could go wrong?

As it turns out, it’s not that easy to figure out where in the movie each of my twenty clips started and stopped. iMovie does not tell you the location in minutes and seconds of the playhead. Let me repeat that, this time in bold , red letters:

Nowhere in iMovie ‘09 is there any indicator of time. Everything is relative to everything else, but it’s not possible to determine where anything is in absolute terms.

What is the implication of this? The implication of this is that any work done in iMovie ‘09 is essentially locked in iMovie and, other than exporting a video, there is no way to get this information (even in an ‘analog’ fashion), to any other application.  How so … very … Apple!

(if anyone who reads this knows a way to either export marker information or to see an absolute timeline in iMovie ‘09, please tell me and I’ll gladly whimper away with my tail between my legs).

why? Why? WHY? Who thought this was a good idea? Who would object or be inconvenienced by having this information appear in the “Playhead Information” that follows the scrubber? I just don’t get it. It really frustrates me.

But the deeper question is, why do I still really really want to use iMovie as opposed to the other software (which, after a really contrived process, I was able to utilize)? Why do I want so badly to want to like this software, and to want to use it?

So my revelation out of this long, tedious retelling of this event is that Apple is kind of like a selfish, flaky friend. You know the kind I’m talking about – the kind of friend that’s great to be with when you’re actually hanging out with them, but the second you ask for a favor, or suggest an activity that they’re not too keen on, you get shot down, because … c’mon … who’s really in charge here? We all know that Apple is wearing the pants in this relationship.

And I’ll put up with it (I suspect other people will too), with all the abuse, with the selfishness, just for the chance to use the software — even on its own terms. Doesn’t matter if Apple shows up late, or forgets about my birthday, I’ll take what I can get, because, when things are good, they’re really good! And when things don’t go so well, I’m willing to cut him some slack, because man, he is cool … I’m surprised he even wants to hang out with me at all. And when other people try to tell me how he’s kind of a douche, and that I’ve got lots of other good, reliable (albeit less cool) people I could be spending my time with, I’ll defend him, but I won’t be able to explain why. You could call it “Cupertino Syndrome.”

On the one hand, this experience was incredibly infuriating, and on the other, it’s completely unsurprising. This is what Apple does, over and over again. Mac. iPod. iPhone. iMovie. You name it. When you buy into something Apple, you’re not only buying into that thing – you’re buying into a whole ecosystem of (sometimes really expensive) stuff to support it and to work well with it. And for most of the people, most of the time, it does work well, very well, in fact. And for many people — myself included — on the average, it’s worth it. By excluding so many features from their software, those features that are included are all the more easier to use. As an interaction designer (and a human), I appreciate this simplicity.

Now that I know the limitations of iMovie ‘09, I probably won’t use it again for doing any kind of substantial video editing. But I will always look back fondly on the good times we shared together, and appreciate him for all of the good qualities, such as learnability, a snazzy user interface and some cool visual effects.

And I thought I read somewhere  that they had a ‘Timeline’ feature back in iMovie ‘06 ….

I recently moved from Chicago, IL, USA to Calgary, AB, Canada. Jury’s still out on whether or not trading the El for the C-Train, pizza and hot dogs for Vietnamese subs, or the lake for the mountains (which have their own lakes!) is worth it …. but one thing’s for sure: I’m really happy with my new job as  Usability Specialist with a company called SMART Technologies,  responsible for  many excellent educational technology hardware and software products, most popularly the SMART Board.

But this post is not about SMART (maybe I’ll write one in the future), it’s about parking in Calgary (something I try to not have to do too much of, but there’s just no way around using a car here). Nothing too insightful here, just a funny parking experience I had and also a  kudos to the city-wide parking system, ParkPlus.

The Bad

It took about a million weeks for my car to ship from Chicago -> Calgary (which is funny as my stuff got here in about one). Once it arrived here, I had to visit around eight different places (government offices, registries, dealerships) in order for my car to be blessed as kosher in Alberta. In any event, there was a period where I had a rental car and my imported Volkswagen and had to strategically shuttle them around so I could take the latter to get inspected and then use the former to get home. A funny thing happened when I tried to park them both in the same lot, using my credit card in the automated parking machine. I swiped my card, paid for a couple hours worth of parking for one car, then went to dip my card again, and got the following error message.

It took my quite a while to figure out what the heck was going on here. I eventually just assumed that my credit card info was stored in some central parking database which doesn’t allow one to have multiple simultaneous sessions on the same card. Understandable … it’s an edge use case …. but I still couldn’t figure out what was the rationale for disallowing this. But … what about that error message, huh? Gotta be one of the best I’ve seen. How about ‘Session in Progress’ or ‘Try Different Card’ ? To me, “Impossible Payment” implies that I tried to pay for -i or 1/0 hours of parking time, or attempted to pay with my blockbuster card. I scrounged up enough loonies to pay with cold hard, cash. It didn’t seem to have any problem with that.

The Good

Not that I enjoy paying for parking — especially at work — but if I have to pay, I want it to be as painless as possible. The ParkPlus system makes parking so easy, you don’t even car that you’re getting ripped off!

Here’s how it works. These payment boxes have sprung up all over the city, and many of the streets have signs with zone numbers posted along them. You park your car somewhere, find the nearest box enter the zone number where you’ve parked your car, dip your credit card and you’re done.  Pretty easy, and ingenious for ParkPlus because adding a new zone is as easy as putting up a pole with a number — no need to install a quarter-based parking meter for every parking spot.

Well, the streets around my work building are Park-Plus-ified, and I’d seen signs advertising a way to pay with your mobile. So one day, instead of walking the extra 250 feet past the front door to the machine, I decided I’d pay with my mobile. I navigated to parkplus.ca with my mobile phone and found it to be not a mobile-optimized site, and I was a bit confused by this. When I got to my desk, I spent some more time navigating around the site from my browser on my PC, and as it turns out, you actually need to call a phone number from your phone to pay for parking — how adorably quaint!! The website is only used to create an account and for you to add money to that account.

Paying exorbitant fees every month to Fido for use of their mobile internet, I was a bit upset that there wasn’t a web site — or better yet a mobile app — I could use to do this, but I thought I’d put some money in my ParkPlus account and give it a go using the ‘ol Dialer app on my Android Phone.  It’s a pretty fluid interaction:

• Place the call
• Press 1 to create a new parking session or cancel current one
• Enter zone number
• System reads it back, press 1 to confirm
• It thanks me, tells me when my session expires and hangs up.

Total time expended ….. 33 seconds. That’s pretty great (as great as paying for parking gets), and quite the relief after having used Fido’s ridiculously inefficient voicemail system. I hope to post more on this later.

Sad fun fact of the day: ParkPlus is at the top of my mobile’s automatically generated ‘Favorites’ list (based on frequency of calls).

Well, using the industrial stapler in my office today, I noticed a little nub sticking out of the front of it that I could swear wasn’t there the last time I used it.

Hard to read from this photo, but it says “User Guide” with a little arrow that invites you to pull the nub towards you. I took the nub challenge and pulled…

Now, while you could argue that a stapler shouldn’t need instructions, I’d argue back that there are some operations – de-jamming, re-filling, or calling for tech support (really?!?) which require kinds of specific information that users shouldn’t have to remember – such as the phone number or the model of staple needed.

So this is pretty nifty, I think, and useful for some bits of information which wouldn’t be immediately obvious. I like how it’s there when you need it, and not when you don’t, is very discoverable, but not knowing about its existence does not negatively impact your experience with the stapler (assuming you don’t need to call tech support  

Also, I’m sure unintentional on the part of the designer, it has a GUI widget feel to it; I was half-expecting the arrow to rotate 180 degrees once the drawer was pulled out to indicate that it could be pushed back in!

One particular sculpture, which I was unfortunately unable to take a photo of (or find online) caught my attention. It was a beautifully intact, almost perfect condition. Roman in origin, the sculpture portrayed Dionysus, the god of wine (and certified party animal) posing with Pan, his little half-goat half-human freaky friend. According to the caption below, Pan was gazing adoringly at Dionysus, but I think it was more lust than love.

But what really struck me about the sculpture is described in the last paragraph:

The sculpture is remarkably intact. Complex pairs rarely survive two thousand years in such complete condition. The artist made careful choices to ensure the figures stability. A tree trunk supports the pair; Pan’s elongated arm is joined to Dionysus’ back; the god’s neck is reinforced by his bound hair, and this hand rests on Pan’s shoulders. Aesthetics, psychology, and engineering combined to create this remarkable work of art.

This is an awesome example of what I see as the intersection of art and design. Granted, I don’t have a formal education in either, but my very vague understanding of the difference between the two is that, while art creates beautiful things, design creates beautiful (possibly functional) things that can be reproduced on some appreciable scale. Art is created in a world of boundless possibility, while good design is forged under the pressure of constraints.

So this sculpture (ack I wish I had a picture of it ) is a great example of what can happen when an artist – a sculptor, in this case – takes into consideration particular constraints, let’s say longevity or robustness.

Would the sculpture have been more beautiful if the figures were prancing through a forest of small saplings as opposed to leaning against a single large trunk chosen by the artist? Perhaps. Would it be more moving if Pan’s “elongated arm” were outstretched,  frozen in some grand gesticulation in homage to Dionysus? Perhaps. But these decisions were made (in retrospect, for the better) and this work of art is no less stunning because of any sacrifices which may have been made.

Whether the particular constraints of longevity and robustness was imposed by the commissioner of this sculpture, or is due solely to the foresight of the artist, we can not know. But whatever the case, this sculpture, clearly built with a set of constraints in mind, has survived in almost perfect condition after two millennia! Have you ever owned a product that lasted that long ?

I guess that the shapes in the Obama logo are generic enough that it could be interpreted in any number of ways  - an american flag? sunrise over a field?  a five-lane highway to change? – but I still think there’s something there. Or maybe it’s just because … I want to believe. (Isn’t that the power of good visual design?)

There’s a lot of great commentary and interpretation out there on the Obama logo. I especially like the visual-design-centric analysis in this article on the graphic design site UnderConsideration. It does a great job of illustrating how flexible the logo is, and how it has been adopted for many different niche demographics, such as this spin which  is intended to engage first Americans:

Beautiful, subtle design. I must admit that I’ve never heard that term before. Is that the currently accepted one?

Check out this one:

Kids are so bad at drawing circles! And they love unicorns. So do I, as a matter of fact. I wish there was a Unicorns for Obama campaign – I think they’d totally vote for him.

Actually, I think that kids find the term “kids” insulting; they prefer to be called Developing Americans.

A price checking station in the Macy's department store.

In the Macy’s department store in New York City, stationed throughout the store are these little stations where you can either scan a gift card to see the remaning balance, or scan the bar code on an item to see how much it costs (most department stores probably have something similar).

Great idea. It’s always nice to be able to scan an item to see what the final price is; with so many overlapping sales going on, it’s impossible to predict what the final price of an item would be.

I didn’t actually use the scanner, so I can’t comment on the usability of the device itself. But I found it quite humorous that, taking a couple steps back and looking at the area around the price check scanner, there was a mountain of discarded clothes!

Mountain of discarded (and presumably expensive!) clothes

Retrospectively, it actually makes a lot of sense, and is indeed not at all surprising. You grab an item off the shelf, bring it over to the price scanner to see how much it costs. When the price registers as a couple orders of magnitude more than you were willing to spend, crestfallen, you resignedly throw it on a pile. Surely you’re not in any mood to put that overprices piece of crap back on the shelf from where you found it!

The presence of a simple clothing rack located next to the price scanner would have been a sufficient hint hint to customers, and helped to avoid the clothespile shown above.

But I think that you could get even more creative with it. From a retailers perspective, one of the great things about online shopping is that clickstreams are an excellent indicator of how people arrive at a certain purchase (sometimes, the ‘why’ can also be extracted). To Macy’s, this discarded pile of clothes should actually represent a feedback loop that communicates these clothes are too expensive. Granted, there are quite a lot of factors that go into pricing of clothes, but if certain items are consistently scanned and then discarded, then this should be interpreted as a sign that a hot item is priced too high.

Taking this even further, and actually integrating some of the ’social’ aspect of online shopping, wouldn’t it be neat if the clothing rack had sections on it like “Almost There,” “A Little Pricey,” and “You’re Joking, Right?!?” This not only would give useful feedback to the store, but is also a way for customers in a brick & mortar store to communicate with one another about what is reasonably priced and what is way out of line. Additionally, the clothes that make it all the way to the price scanner can be considered to be ‘vetted’ ; while veryone has different tastes, and everyone has a different notion of pricey, this rack can present another opportunity for a customer to grab something off the rack which they otherwise might not have!

But I was still somewhat reluctant to not have a car at all. There are always, after all, those occasions where you could walk, run, take a train or bus, but life is so much easier if you have a car (IKEA, huge food shoppings and weekend getaways come to mind). So I had my car shipped out here, and over the course of a couple of months, it became clear to me the couple of times a month I actually used it did not nearly justify the cost of insurance, parking and payments (on the order of $600 a month). My father, whose at-the-tine-current car’s lease was coming up, graciously took over payments on it

A couple of months later, when my girlfriend came out here, we thought that since her car was already paid off, perhaps the reduced cost of ownership (insurance + parking) would make keeping a car in the city cost-effective. But, perhaps partly because we both enjoy walking so much, we ended up using the car even less, and even at a cost of $300 a month, for the once or twice we used the car, it just wasn’t really worth it. Her parents gladly took it off our hands and drove it back to New York.

Lesson learned: regardless of additional costs, the cost of mere parking alone (~$200 in downtown Chicago) is enough to make owning a seldomly-driven car very cost-ineffective. 

***

I’d heard a lot about car sharing services such as Zipcar and I-GO, which seemed like viable options for those “life is so much easier with a car” moments. After a bit of research on the web, we decided on I-GO; while the prices seemed pretty comparable, we preferred I-GO because it uses only energy-efficient vehicles (seemed to be in the spirit of the whole car sharing thing), and is a local not-for-profit organization.

While I could go on and on about why I think that car sharing is so nifty and progressive, the intent of this post is to look at I-GO from a service design and usability perspective, so I’ll save all that other idealist rambling for another time.

I’ve posted a Flickr photoset which shows some of the key components of the I-GO service, how they all fit together, and details some of the steps involved in using a car from the time you pick it up until the time you drop it off (I don’t get into the reservation process).

I-GO car parked in dedicated spot at Merchandise Mart

My overall impression is that the whole process is a bit overwhelming the first time around, but certainly manageable, and gets drastically easier to navigate with subsequent uses. Here, in no particular order, are some thoughts about my experience using I-GO thus far (I’ve used on two occasions for a total of three hours):

Perceived complexity

To be honest, I was pretty nervous the first time I took out a car. There is something inherently nerve-wracking about driving “someone else’s car,” and this feeling is magnified when their are novel procedures and novel artifacts to deal with. It’s not just a matter of learning how to use a key fob and getting familiar with the layout of a different car; beyond that, there are many other components in the ecosystem that you must manage or interact with: the I-GO card,  the card reader, and the console, to name a few.

The instructions on the I-GO site are clear and pretty simple, and they’ve even put together a concise quick-start Go Guide. Despite the excellent documentation, howeever, the inherent stress in driving an unfamiliar vehicle (and a Prius, nonetheless, it’s like a space pod) combined with the specialized equipment and new procedure made it such that the first time around was kind of stressful. Fortunately, there weren’t any actual hangups. The second time I took out the car, things seemed a whole lot easier as I started to become familiar with how things work.

Revamp the Keypad

I’ve only been a member of I-GO for a couple of months, apparently the keypad (what I’ve been calling the console) is new as of May 2007. I’m not sure what served this function prior to the rehaul.

Barring an emergency, the interaction with the keypad is fairly minimal: you need to remove the key fob from it at the outset of your reservation, and confirm that you’re back at the drop-off point and re-insert the key fob to complete your trip. But to be honest, it’s a pretty intimidating -looking device:

I-GO car keypad

 
  As I point out in the walkthrough on Flickr, they keypad’s screen is actually very helpful in giving step-by-step directions, giving you instructions for what the possible next actions are based on the current situtation (car started, car stopped, at final location, etc.) I’m sure that there are security concerns, and it is necessary to stash the keypad in the glove compartment, instead of keeping it out on the dashboard. Additionally, I realize that they wanted one solution to work with the many different models of cars in the I-GO fleet, and this is probably the best lowest-common-denominator option to deliver all the required functionality (e.g. as opposed to something specifically designed for the Prius which wouldn’t work in a Honda Fit).

Mix of high-tech, low-tech, and honor system

I’m really impressed with the way that I-GO has employed a mix of digital and analog solutions to handle all the core activities that comprise the overall act of ‘driving a car.’  Some things are managed by technology (the initial unlocking and final locking of the car with the key card), while others rely on more low-tech solutions (writing up a report about pre-existing damage on a carbon-copy paper pad).

Damage reports note pad

Driver's-side visor holds monthly parking keycard

In addition, there is a code of  ’rules’ that members must follow, so that the whole shared car arrangement runs smoothly. To give an example, if a car you’ve taken out runs below 1/4 tank of gas, you’re required to fill it up. You aren’t required to pay for the gas (that cost is covered by a supplied gas card), but you’re required to actually fill it up. There’s also rules like no pets without carriers, report pre-existing damage before you take out the car, make sure to clean up the car after use, etc. Because there’s no direct oversight — no one’s waiting  for you at the drop-off to check things out — it’s probably possible to get away with some minor infractions without being caught (and having to pay a fee), but things seem to get along pretty well with the existing system of rules; all the cars I’ve been in seem to be in great shape.

In a sense, this feels like a Frankenstein solution: many small individual parts cobbled together to make a coherent whole.  It’s a delicate balance, but one that works surprisingly well.  I would hope that a sense of shared ownership (after all, that’s what it is) and having a stake in such an exciting new revolution, would be enough to overcome the commons syndrome. 

I’d be interested to see how the service evolves over time. As new technologies become available, will they be integrated into the system to replace some of the current use cases which depend on the more low-tech or honor system solutions?

Changes the way I drive … and more

Perhaps the most importnat, and the most interesting effect of having used the I-GO service is that it really changes the way I drive, and how I view driving and cars.

A car is no longer a commodity, but a treat, to be reserved for special occasions. In fact, when I drive a car now, it feels too easy – like I’m cheating – like I should be walking instead. The act of driving is now a very conscious decision, one that can not be made on the spur of the moment, but which must be planned ahead of time, almost (but not quite as complicated) as booking a train or a flight. 

It really makes you think: must I drive, or can I just walk instead? And if I must drive, then I need to plan very carefully, because I need to know ahead of time how long it will take me and thus for how long to reserve a car. It forces me to aggregate multiple errands into one trip to carefully choose my destination and to plot out routes.

Another unintended, but nevertheless much welcome, side-effect of this required planning is that, if my destination involves shopping, I am forced to be much more efficient in choosing whatever it is I’m buying. No more prolonged unnecessary deliberation about over trivial decisions is definitely a good thing (see my post on The Paradox of Choice for more on this).

In summary 

Try I-GO. Even if you have a car that you’re contemplating getting rid of, sign up for a trial (there are many plans which don’t require a financial commitment) and see if it’s right for you. It’s easy to use (as I hope I’ve shown), it’s affordable, and though it sounds kind of twisted, not driving very often actually makes it quite fun (especially if you’re driving a Prius). And if you’re on the fence, not sure if you can survive in the city without a car, then challenge yourself (I bet you can!).  You’ll be able to adapt — and with all the money saved, the extra miles walked, and the carbon emissions spared, you will be glad you did.