TeraTech Creates a Smooth Ride for Metro Customers; Rockville Company's Web Expertise Achieves Radical Overhaul of WMATA Site

Business Wire, Feb 3, 2005

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- When the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) decided their online route-planning tool needed a comprehensive redesign, they turned to TeraTech in Rockville, Maryland. As part of an overall facelift and functionality upgrade to the public transit system's website, the "RideGuide" became the "Metro Trip Planner," with a clean new look, improved efficiency, and a more prominent placement on Metro's homepage (www.wmata.com).

TeraTech, the company entrusted with creating the new and improved Trip Planner, is no stranger to the difficulties of efficiently handling a million complex data points behind a simple, clean facade. The company specializes in creating customized software and websites that accomplish complicated tasks in a simple and effective way. Creating technological tools that handle large amounts of sophisticated data in a way that makes a task easy for the end-user are all in a day's work for TeraTech's small, talented group of programmers.

Established in 1989, TeraTech is a privately-held, Rockville-based company which creates custom software and web-based tools for a wide variety of corporate clients, governmental agencies, and associations. The company specializes in projects that deliver a highly interactive, easy-to-use, efficient experience for the end user and company, such as job application sites, searchable databases, and event registration. By streamlining processes and organizing data for the customer's specific needs, TeraTech's customized products save their customers' time and money, and help them keep key functions running smoothly.

In the near future, TeraTech will add even more functionality to the "Find a Stop/Station" portion of the WMATA Trip Planner. Rather than simply listing the stations in the system, customers will be able to enter an address or landmark and receive a list of the bus stops and stations that are within 1/4 mile to a mile of the selected location. This new feature should enable the system's customers to easily become more familiar and comfortable with the range of transit options the entire system has to offer.

"For maximum impact, the redesign of WMATA's web site needed to include a redesign of our trip planning application," said Syd Gariss, Metro's web manager. "Considering that the two redesigns had to be implemented simultaneously, we realized we needed help. To accomplish our goals we turned to TeraTech. We chose TeraTech because of their solid reputation for handling this type of project, and our experience with them proved that their reputation was well earned."

"For tourists and residents alike, many Metro customers' first impression of the system is via the Trip Planner, so the Trip Planner had to be at least as easy to use as the Metro system itself," said Michael Smith, President and founder of TeraTech. "We were charged by WMATA to create a tool that is easy to use, customer-friendly, and interactive in order to align the tool with WMATA's new customer-service goals. We achieved that through streamlining: what used to take four steps with the old RideGuide now takes two. The design upgrades and new features also integrate the Trip Planner with the rest of the WMATA site."

TeraTech worked with San Francisco design firm 415.com on the new look and navigation and with Trapeze Software on the SOAP interface to their ATIS (Automated Transit Information System). TeraTech used CFMX and SOAP to make calls to ATIS to populate the trip-planning templates.

More information about TeraTech, including a visual comparison of the RideGuide and the Metro Trip Planner can be found at www.teratech.com.