Goo Trans

#Class Project #UI Design #User Research #Bus Stop Interface

An interactive bus stop panel that provides a better transfer experience for passengers who need to take different kinds of public transportation.

Overview

Project Background

In the mid-term plan of the Transportation Bureau of the Taichung City Government,  Wuri ( 烏日 ) Transit Center will build as an important transportation hub, connecting the two major public transportation systems surroundings ─ MRT and bus transport stations to provide passengers with comprehensive mass transit services.

However, although Taichung currently has more than 700 bus stop panels, most of them still use non-interactive panel or paper lists, which cannot effectively simplify important information and provide it to passengers in real-time. We want to create an interactive bus stop panel for a new transport hub to reduce passenger transfer costs between different public transportation and increase the public transportation transfer rate.

Design Process

Conduct Research to Understand Opportunity and Users' Pain Point

Current Situation Analysis

According to the 2018 municipal statistical analysis updated by Taichung City Office, the public transportation system is not the most commonly used transportation vehicle for the citizens. As you can see in Figure 1, the current utilization rate of public transportation is about 12%.

However, after the Taichung city government announced that taking the bus is free of charge within ten kilometers and improved the bus network, more and more people began to use public transportation systems. Meanwhile, it can be found in Figure 2 that the number of passengers using the Taichung Railway has also been increasing year by year. We think that the demand for public transportation will keep growing in the future.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Pain Points

While the demand for public transportation, especially the bus, seems to be increasing, we found that passengers rarely used buses to travel between the city and the transport hub in the suburbs.​ After conducting the survey with 20 passengers, we discover two main problems during the transfer process.

• Time gaps ─ inconsistency between different kinds of transportation.
  

• Information gaps ─ the information about the transfer place cannot be effectively obtained
  

Therefore, the reason wasn’t the price of tickets or a lack of buses; rather, it was that transfer information could not be easily obtained. More specifically, the timetable font at the station hall was crowded and small, and some information was placed above the bus stop panel outside the station. Both were hard for passengers to see.

Problem Statement

Provide An User-Friendly Interactive Bus Stop Panel

Goal

In order to effectively solve the problems mentioned above, we want to design a new interactive bus stop panel to improve the existing bus stop of the Wuri ( 烏日 ) Transit Center. By applying a touch interface and user-friendly design, passengers no longer have to passively receive the information, but interact with the transport information by themselves.

Stakeholders' Concern

We also found that there were five important stakeholders: Government, passengers, cooperative transportation units, related manufacturers, and media involved ​in the whole transfer process and the setting of the new stop.
We want to understand the needs of each stakeholder, evaluate the concerns of them, and consider the related risks and conflicts that may arise during cooperation, so as to prevent problems in advance and establish a good and long-term cooperative relationship.

Solution

Design Process

Create UI Flow To Decide The Main Function

For starters, we created the UI flow and listed the three main functions and pages for this project, including: search for the bus routes, search for different kinds of transportation, and other functions, such as using QR code to provide feedback.

Draw Flow Chart To Clarify The Way User Interacts With The Interface

To better understand how we would construct the experience for the interactive bus stop, we designed a flow chart. We focused on the experience and needs of the user instead of the details that we would solidify later on. It also allowed us to communicate the entries and exits more clearly.

Design Low-Fidelity Wireframe To Visualize Layout And Functionality

We formed an ideal user journey on the bus stop panel in the previous steps. Now we tried to sketch out our wireframes and figure out how to connect each page. The size of the wireframe is based on the size of the existing stop panel (91 cm * 28 cm) at the Taichung High-Speed Rail Station.​​​​​​ The bottom of the panel is one meter off the ground and the top area of the panel is for the advertisement since it cannot be touched easily.

Iterate The Project Through User Testing

We ran user testing on the lo-fi prototype with several participants to better understand their interaction patterns. We found that:

Detail for unconventional interface

Some of the buttons are too high. Bus stop panel is not a conventional interface such as mobile or desktop so the main interaction area should be somewhere users can easily reach.

Need more input methods

Originally, we only design one input method. However, some people may have difficulties typing. We should also include other input methods such as handwriting or voice input.

Main Features & Final Design Based On Users' Feedback

Basically, the visual design is the screen-by-screen pixel-perfect visualization of the wireframes in detail. This part is all made by myself with Figma. Orange, white and gray were chosen as the main colors because they are also the main color of Taiwan High-Speed Rail and the icons were kept light to make the page look simple.

Visual Element

Prototype

Expected Result

• Make it easy for people that have different familiarity with electronic products to use.
  

• Passengers no longer need to passively receive data, but can search for information by interacting with the screen.​
  

• Provide clearer instructions for transferring to improve the efficiency of public transportation.
  

• Expand the service to other areas in Taichung, or even to the whole country.
  

Expected profit

Take the establishment of five stop signs as the standard. After evaluating the panel price, maintenance cost, and electricity bill, it costs about $12221 to set up the panel for the first month and $4240 per month thereafter. And the estimated advertising cost for each board is $880/month, so the income that can be obtained from this setting is $4400/month, which requires ten months before breaking even.

Expected bus traffic

We hope to increase the bus transfer rate by 5% and the annual bus traffic by approximately 600,000 passengers. In this way, the annual bus traffic in Taichung City can exceed 140 million passengers.

Reflection & Future Plan

• How many interactive panels should we establish in the station to meet the passengers’ needs?
  

  In the future, we would like to conduct research to learn how much time passengers typically spend using this panel and is there a situation that needs to be queued for use.
  

• During the pandemic, is it better to use a personal App instead of a shared panel?
  

  Because we hope to provide a convenient transfer process for both passengers who want to go home and tourists new in town, we think that it would be troublesome if the tourists need to download an App every time they visit a new place. Also, if the passengers have no wi-fi connection on their phone, they will have no access to the transfer information on the App.
  During the pandemic, we hope to provide alcohol spray next to the bus stop and clean the panel more often to reduce the chance of passengers contracting the virus.
  

Takeaways