Summary
With growth, comes growing pains. NWA GO recently added new lines to the Washington and State bus route. This caused confusion for riders who frequented this stop, those who used it occasionally, and new riders. They need a way to streamline users ability to see which bus is next at Washington and State, and how long before it arrives.
Overview
Target Audience:
Residents, visitors, and students in northwest Arkansas using public transportation to commute around the area.
The Solution
The suggested solution presented will assist people with navigating the cities infrastructure in an intrinsic and natural way giving riders the ability to:
See the current, physical location of the bus.
Is my bus on schedule or delayed?
Ability to check routes/stops.
Plan their trip according to bus arrivals at multiple stops
Roles:
User Research - Ideation - UI Design - Prototyping -User Testing
Deliverables:
User Personas, User Stories & Flows, Wire frames, Usability Testing, High Fidelity Mock ups, Clickable Prototypes, Style Guide
Research and Discovery:
By conducting an online poll, I gathered valuable insights into the pain points experienced by users and discovered that:
Problem
The new bus routes created confusion and did not result in the increase in ridership they had anticipated. Specifically at Washington and State. With so many new routes, regular users were uncertain when their bus would arrive with all the new added routes at their stop.
After gathering info from my poll, I conducted three in person interviews. I asked the following questions:
How do you plan your use of public transportation?
How do you utilize public transportation?
What is the best layout for seeing relevant information regarding the bus schedule/routes?
What frustrates you most about public transportation?
Do you have to set reminders so you know when to catch a bus?
What mobile apps have you used before, that you like using?
I did a comparative analysis
Insights:
What are their pain points?
Strengths:
Makes finding bus stops easy
Shows what stop is yours
In app ticket purchase
Weakness:
ETA assumes bus is coming.
If there is no bus coming, timer will just restart.
Opportunities:
Ability to have actual live updates
Show if bus is full or not
Strengths:
shows multiple ways to get there including ride shares, and bikes
Included price
Can search nearby to see closest bus stops and light rail stations
Weakness:
Does not show you all the features and how to use them. Have to look around to find them.
Opportunties:
Show bus prices
Step by step directions how to get to bus and how many stops
Strengths:
Share your ETA
Commute assist, lets you set work location
Get trip stats (calories burned, trees and money saved)
Weakness:
Shows transportation for methods that might not be available in a city
Opportunities:
Create a great onboarding process
Give alerts when time to get off bus
Persona:
I created a person based on all the information gathered through research that is based on our target audience.
Define
User Story:
With this new information I was able to create a scenario of what a bus trip downtown would look like for Sydney:
User flows
After creating the scenario, I needed to consider how our user would enter information, and what information would be necessary to navigate the app.
Paper Lo-Fi:
Started sketching basic concepts on paper. (See below for sample)
Wire frames:
Wire frames were made to help visualize the structure and layout.
Prototyping
Iteration 1
Originally I had the bus routes drop down menu, follow from one screen to the next. This option took up to much screen space, to fix that issue, I changed it to only show the option you selected.
Iteration 2
The back arrows were a great option to take the user back to the previous page, but there was no option to return to the home screen. I added the X which allowed them to return to the home screen.
Iteration 3
I moved the text on the routes from center text to left aligned to reduce distraction during testing.
I conducted user testing to make a low fidelity prototype.
Scenarios for users:
Finding the schedule for Washington and State.
Finding how much time to get to a bus stop.
The ability to get home from work and other destinations.
Locate the next bus at Washington and State.
What I found:
All users were able to complete the tasks with minimal effort.
Users wanted to see the route on the map.
Found arrows for drop down menu confusing
A profile option to see favorites, work, home
Final thoughts
Due to my limited knowledge in the subject, this project proved to be highly challenging and demanding. However, more than the final result, I am delighted to have experienced the entire process of witnessing the development of a project from its inception to its completion.
My takeaways:
Testing the app with end users allowed me to gain insight into creating an app for others instead of creating an app for myself.
From research, to testing, to interviewing, every aspect of this process was a great learning experience.
While using the app I found many problems that had alternate solutions, once I started moving toward the final user design.