Substrakt

This award-winning site, which draws 65,000 unique users each month, allows urban walkers to find possible routes in 14 city locations, along with information on time, distance, step count, calories and CO2 savings. walkit.com recently joined Flickr, Amazon, Last.fm and Dopplr in being named The Guardian’s 100 top sites for the year ahead.

Substrakt were appointed to transform the site ready for a high profile re-launch, which unveiled a host of new features. These include enhanced navigation and search functions, as well as links to relevant content on everything from keeping fit to going green.

When we started the project we looked closely at the flow of the user though the site; how would they discover how to plan a route? how would they go from city to city? how easily could they do a route in Manchester and then plan another one in London?

Part of this process involved prototyping our ideas and doing usability testing in the field. We recorded user reactions and the way they interacted with the site as well as asking their opinion about our redesigned interface.

After gathering information from users and researching an appropriate development direction we focused on making the site cleaner, simpler and easier to use.

A key part of the redesign was the experience of planning a route, thousands of people use this everyday to find walking directions. We had to strike a balance between adding new features while keeping it simple so anyone could use it. The final form uses tabs to separate different route types, a simple drop down to select a city and support for quickly adding and removing destinations.

The walking results page contains a lot of unique and personalised statistics such as CO2 reduction, calorie count and step count. Presenting this information was very important. We tried to compromise between being able to see the complex information while still remaining clear. At the top of the each result is a statdock, the statdock shows users average stats for their journey as well as personalised stats from mywalkit.

As well as redesigning the front of walkit we also built a new CMS which allows pages to be visually rearranged in the backend. Walkit uses a widget system to create content, which can be added to multiple pages and easily rearranged. This allows walkit to quickly create, change and rearrange content depending on topic, theme or city by simply dragging and dropping it.

We are currently working on a second phase of developments, providing even more tools to support keen walkers and occasional walkers alike.