Design 5, fall '20
Designing a new public transportation app
This was a group project in our systems design class. The goal here was to improve an aspect of travelling in downtown Trondheim. This was largely limited to the public transit, as we were told not to work on the scale of city planning, and a level of sustainability was expected.
The project started with a deal of research, focused on the existing solutions at the time and weighing their positives and negatives. We also made a questionnaire that received over 500 responses, and did field research interviewing users of a pilot project by AtB. The questionnaire focused on gathering information about what the main transport methods are in Trondheim, as well as general perception of the public transport offerings. Some of the results are shown below.
The graphs on the left show the distribution of transport methods in the Trondheim region, according to where the respondent lives (in the downtown area, outside of the downtown area, and not in Trondheim). The ones on the right show the main methods of transport by life situation, such as being a student, working fulltime, or retired. Using results from the questionnaire, we decided to improve some aspect of using busses in Trondheim.
Within this, we came up with three main ideas:
1. Self-driving busses to cover areas where there are fewer stops and less frequent departures.
2. Better collaboration between the different transport methods, especially busses and electric scooters (which were new and exciting at the time).
3. A smart, transparent and fair pricing system. Price was listed as one of the biggest reasons people don't use the busses.
We chose the second option after discussing the three with our professor. Our solution was a package of proposed improvements to the local bus app, bus stops, and pricing model.
The app we designed can be found at the bottom of this page (Adobe doesn't like Figma links sometimes). Our app was prototyped extensively so that we could user test with students and family members, and continuously tweak and improve the app. The biggest change to the app is that it combined three apps, as at the time the route planner, ticket app, and departure times each had their own app.
In addition to this, we added integrations with Voi (an electric scooter company), and the city bikes (bysykkel), so that route planning would include those transport methods. You could also choose to add tickets for Voi and Bysykkel at a discounted price, if you already had a bus ticket.
I was not as involved in this process, but time also went into improving the bus stop user experience, by having designated parking for city bikes and electric scooters. The idea here is to make it easier to get to and from bus stops for those who live a considerable distance from the nearest one. This would hopefully be a mutually beneficial relationship, where both transport methods see more use.
As far as pricing was concerned, there were two main changes. The first was that the ticket price would be adjusted down slightly, in addition to making more discounted ticket types. From our user research, the main reason people took the bus without buying a ticket was the extremely high price. Adjusting the price down would likely make people more willing to buy the tickets. The second change was the opportunity to get discounted tickets when combining transport methods (bus + bike or scooter). We also made some other tweaks to the user experience, such as automatically upgrading individual tickets to period tickets if the user was purchasing an excessive amount of tickets, and suggesting period tickets to users based on their purchase history.
The link to the prototype is here: https://www.figma.com/proto/1arNvJLxhJnn9Is4Ee0Jvj/D5---prototype?node-id=41%3A152&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=27%3A157&show-proto-sidebar=1