Puget Sound Trip Planner App Design
Redesigning a Native Mobile App for Puget Sound Commuters
Overview
The Puget Sound Trip Planner is the native mobile application for King County’s Metro system. The public transportation in King County can be a burden to navigate, and King County developed the Trip Planner to help people plan their way around utilizing the county’s resources.
My Role & Methods
UX Researcher
Generative Research: Google Survey, User Interviews, Guerilla Interviews
Evaluative Research: Usability Testing
My Team
Duration
2 weeks
Tools
Google Survey, Voice Memos, Keynote, Sketch, InVision, Slack, Paper, Pencils, Teamwork!
Challenge
The mobile app for Puget Sound Trip Planner is simply not competing with the other commuter mobile applications used in the King County area. My team’s goal: improve this application’s popularity, usability, and increase its Apple app store star rating (currently at a 1.9).
Solution
Add a new feature that explicitly emphasized when users’ buses would arrive to increase the daily usage of Puget Sound Trip Planner and thereby increasing the rating in Apple’s app store.
Defining Target Users
To start this project and begin my research, I cast a wide net. I needed to determine my target user. I created a brief Google Form survey to be shared among my team’s social networks. My two requirements for participants were that they had to live within King County and have used public transportation in the last month.
Survey
After 23 responses in 48 hours, I closed the survey. Analyzing my results, I found that 56% of my participants used public transportation only during the weekdays and 47% used public buses to commute. Therefore I was comfortable narrowing users for this redesign to King County residents who utilize public buses for commuting.
How Often Do You Use Public Transportation?
What Kind of Transportation do you use?
Challenges faced by 50% of target users include:
Full buses passing their stop.
Buses consistently being late.
User Interviews
Now that I had data to understand who my target users were and what problems they faced, I began recruiting for user interviews. I interviewed 5 public bus commuters about their experiences and had them tour the current Puget Sound Trip Planner app. I wanted to understand how our target users experienced the current native app and in what circumstances they would utilize it.
To analyze the qualitative information from the interviews, I called my team together to create an affinity diagram.
We generated a lot of dialogue and faced a challenge of identifying a user problem we all agreed upon. For me, if there was no trend strong enough to sway my team members, I needed more research.
There was no time to recruit and interview, so I took to the streets. The bus stops to be exact. I spoke with 12 individuals at downtown Seattle bus stops. None of them had used the native application, but two of them had used the online web version once to find their current bus routes and schedules.
All of the individuals I spoke with showed me OneBusAway as the mobile application they used most often. OneBusAway does one thing, and that’s tell the user when their bus is coming.
Primary Persona
Robin, a 26 year old who commutes to work into downtown Seattle every weekday. They use public transportation as their main mode of transportation, and like to take the bus to social events after work to visit friends.
Robin is an Apple iOS user who is familiar with native apps, and consider themselves tech savvy. They appreciate accurate information presented to them in a clear, easy format.
They are losing trust in public transportation as buses are always late, full, or sometimes completely “ghost” the stop and never show. Robin can’t spend anymore money on getting to work, and becomes frustrated daily with the unknown schedule of their bus.
Robin needs accurate updates on their bus route to get to work because they become frustrated when they don’t know where their bus is or when it’s going to arrive.
How Can I Design Best For Robin?
Offering information straight from the source!
“Get me to work on time!”
“I don’t know the bus schedules.. I just want to know when my bus is coming.”
Insights Setting the Direction of Design
We believe that by displaying accurate and reliable bus arrival times to users that we will ease commuter’s frustrations thereby creating a pleasant commuting experience. If this is successfully implemented we expect to see an increase in the average rating of the app.
Now that our team had a problem, Huda Malik, our interaction designer, went straight to work creating wireframes and a digital prototype to test our hypothesis.
Usability Testing
3 rounds of usability testing with that digital prototype and I still didn’t feel like I had enough metrics to say our feature improved the Puget Sound Trip Planner.
The task for each round of testing was for the user to find the fastest bus route to the Space Needle from their current location. Our testers were still recruited under the parameters of being a King County resident who uses public buses to commute during the weekdays
For each round of testing a common theme began to emerge: testers didn’t know when they had completed the task.
I went back to the public bus stops. I asked a lot of people, but was only able to have 4 users compare our high-fidelity digital prototype to the current native app. I gave them the same task as the previous rounds, but asked them to preform the task with each application and talk about their experience.
They loved it!
“It’s a lot quicker”
“It’s more clear”
“My 12 year old sister could use this.”
With these experiences, I knew we had created a feature that improved users’ experience with the Puget Sound Trip Planner.
Final Prototype
Organization is Key
I learned the importance of keeping my own notes and documents clear and easy to find. My team and I shared a folder together, and when everything was labeled, working together was a breeze.
Communicate Often
My team organized stand-ups everyday, which was great for staying on track. In reflection, I realized that those stand-ups were pure business. Once the project was complete, I realized that there wasn’t a space to communicate feelings of being overwhelmed or stressed during the project. It’s important to speak up and ask for help! Your team is there for you and wants you to succeed.
This was my first design project working with a group. I am so thankful to my team members and amazed at our growth.