First Impressions – Traffix (Beta): A Crowd-sourced Traffic App for Lagosians

Traffix (Beta) is a crowd-sourced traffic app that helps you keep up with Lagos traffic. There are no native mobile apps yet – Traffix is web-based but very well adapted for mobile.

So far, I think Traffix is quite intuitive. They borrow some ideas from Twitter, so the average Twitter user should find it relatively easy to use . You can follow popular traffic routes just like you follow people on Twitter. The default landing page is appropriately called the, you guessed it right, timeline. It displays all the traffic reports and requests chronologically in real-time.

Responding to traffic request is as easy as clicking ‘Reply’, which takes you to another page where you’re presented with a comment box and a slider for indicating the speed of traffic, ranging from “very slow” to “very fast”. The slider tends to behave more like a “selector” than a “slider” though.

Requesting a traffic report, on the other hand, is not as intuitive. First you have to find the route of interest – by navigating your way to “My Area” or using the search functionality – before you can post a request. As far as I’m concerned, that is “long thing”.

Methinks the primary purpose for anyone using this app would be to have their request answered first, not the other way around. So it would be nice if one could post traffic requests from the timeline. Maybe if there was a search field embedded into the timeline?

Geolocation appears to be enabled but it seems to me like it was an afterthought. I was able to submit a traffic report for Third Mainland Bridge even though I was miles away from it. I made sure to try it in the middle of the night though, when I’m sure there’s no traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge. Some pranksters may not be that considerate.

Traffix is still in its beta testing stage so there is plenty of room for improvement. In all, I think there’s a lot of potential here and if the guys at Traffix play their cards right, they just might “hit”. For now, what they really need is a lot of awareness. Everything else should follow on naturally from there.

Try out Traffix yourself at traffix.ng

Author: Muyiwa Matuluko

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