Greetings Everyone, am Confidence Founder of Beat Traffik, i and my team has been busy within the last months working to build one of Africa’s effective traffic application, with the aim of reducing commute time. Please find below our Responsive website, browse through it and give us feedbacks, with your help we can create a web and mobile application that will not only help Nigerians but Africans at large.
http://beattraffik.ostwork.com/reports/index
Best Regards,
Odionye Confidence
#smallbeans
i. Any traffic report older than 4hrs may not count as useful anymore. Archive them automatically, but only if n-number of posts preceeds it.
For content sake you wouldn’t want to remove all your 4hr post(s) from the stream into archive. if they are the only available updates for any area.
ii. Time stamp.
For better User experience.
Instead of 30/06/2015 - 14:34 pm
Use Today - 24 minutes ago
Keep in mind people may be glancing on their phones while driving, and any less difficulty they have understanding your updates would be helpful.
iii. After registration, I think it wouldn’t be inappropriate to ask users for their work & weekend itinerary. Maybe also their waking hours (safest guess). Nothing to swear by.
And phone number (I’d explain the mobile request below)
iv. Your parameters only reads;
Heavy traffic / Slow moving traffic / Free moving traffic
Instead you should have tickers numbering 1-5 on scale of traffic. ! 1 meaning no traffic , 5 meaning heavy traffic B2B. You don’t have to spell it out.
Use few seconds delay after ticking for entry to go in, instead of tick and click (save). Update reports would be alot swifter.
Forget the ‘create report’ thingy. Why would anyone be bothered with that besides on twitter when the cognitive reward is a retweet or favorite from the traffic ‘comptroller’.
I also have no idea what purpose accident and Robbery report would serve.
For accidents people are more likely to take pictures and send to Linda ikeji, for Robbery (no Nigerian will do undercover for any traffic app, not even for billion dollar WAZE)
It is safe to assume that your interested users base will be made up of car owners. Every other person is rather at the mercy of when he/she finds a public transport not relative to traffic (but they’re still useful, I’d explain how you can incentivize their participation)
#bigbeans
i. A web app should simple sit their for show. The main toy for this play is a lite mobile app and your native SMS app (available on any dumb phone).
ii. How you solicit updates and how you score them:
How to aggregate these updates en mass and as real time as possible, create a simple SMS module.
Reporting should be as simple as the instance below;
3mb - 5 [send]
Or
Adekunle - 2 [send]
(Could be better, just writing as it comes to me)
iii. Reporting supported via app can work as simply as requesting phone location Once a user has selected traffic indicator (1-5). No point in bothering the user with sticking an area to it. Location technologies are pretty accurate nowadays.
So for user to report. All s/he sees is the indicator, click on it and location is stuck to it.
Acknowledgement messages could go like "Thank you, Warden Tim, please do let us know when you leave the traffic "
(That is if the indicator was a 3 or higher)
That last message brings us to another interesting bit.
Me finger hurts, will continue this one later!
iv. Incentives. Create a simple incentives program. It is not iron clad but it may do. 100 free credit for any commuter, and within a week you must have sent 50 worth of updates the rest is yours to be creditted again.
This is so folks plying commuters buses can help out with which part of Lagos is stuck up.
v. Scoring your aggregate. With many varying entries, most probably gamed. You’d have to use a mixed system of scoring. Average of cumulative score and weight of entry of certain confirmed user as opposed to other users.
#Biggerbean
i. On account of the lively traffic data you could be mining. Upward scale is to map Lagos based on traffic heat.
And even more ingenious working algorithms to suggest alternative routes. Imagine if an app made signicant difference each day on how many hours you spent in traffic?
Every feature and experience listed here is technically feasible. Any developer who knows his/her way around a friendly(redeployable) php framework can tarry with you to startup glory.
Thanks Chucks, would work on it.
@87_chuks Great Feedback!
@Confidence It does feel like this should be an app with information overlayed on Google Maps - easier for users. The idea of signing up users to your traffic sms alert service could also work although most of the general traffic information is likely provided by radio stations.
I’m sure you already picked this post up on techcabal.
The notoriety of traffic in Nigeria has led to individuals using their ingenuity to come up with solutions to enable commuters overcome this recurrent issue. Say hello to traffic monitoring applications.