iBART: Actions vs. Options

The iBART iOS app is a great example of the do's and don'ts of creating the look and text copy for your actions and options.  What we have here is effectively a web form with select inputs, where the options are displayed on a second page.  "Show Trips" is effectively a button or an input of type submit.  But as you can see from figure one, that distinction is not made very clear.

Figure 1: Before:



Figure 2: After:




The screenshot in figure one doesn't quite capture the confusion, but "arriving: 8:00am" by default reads, "Departing Now", which somewhat sounds like a call-to-action similar to "Show Trips" directly below. It doesn't help that "Show Trips" is written in plural, misleadingly suggesting that it was another option instead of the button to see the final result of the singular trip you've just configured above.
The "Plan Trip" button equivalent in figure two solves that issue by first fixing the text copy, and by also providing the affordance of a clickable button with a call-to-action, in contrast to the row item that blended in as another row below "Departing Now".

But instead of learning from the solution to their mistake, they've turned the crosshair and cycle icon buttons in the first figure (which looked deceptively like icons instead of buttons), and made them even less obvious as buttons.

The arrow "location" icon and cycle "swap" icon are juxtaposed with the identically flat arrow in the row below, making them appear as icons only serving to make each row more uniquely identifiable. Users arriving to this screen for the first time would have to accidentally discover that there were options when these icons were tapped.  They share the same look as the icon-only indicators to the far left such that they provide no affordances of being buttons on the far right.

But to top it off, those empty and filled dots on the left being chosen to represent "from" and "to" is very unintuitive, as there is no association across these sets.

iBART is a great application for those using the BART system in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I hope they learn to get their most important page in their app done in a sensible way.