Improving public transportation journeys through UX

It is not easy to use public transportation in an unknown place, we all know that, but everyday users also have their own difficulties, such as delays or disruptions. This project aims to help both types of users, bringing useful tools for each one to help them feel orientated and safe wherever they are and considering their needs.

There are many products providing information about public transportation, but yet, there is a difficulty to find consistent information about public transportation in an easy way. The solutions found on the market do not tackle all the user needs and provide half made solutions which consider only people who don’t know where to go, disregarding people who usually take a route to work or study but need realtime information about their path and providing alternatives considering the costs and time to travel.

Not less important, the existing solutions seem to consider users from big cities, leaving those in mid-sized cities with tools on their hands that don’t seem to be built for them.

Example: it is okay for big cities to indicate bus or subway times by using intervals, as they are frequent services, but in smaller cities, it is not useful to see “each 40 minutes”, because it is too long to just sit and wait. Instead, people in these places rely on fixed timetables to check if their bus is about to depart.

These perceptions we got from user interviews with public transportation users from different cities: São Paulo — SP and Londrina — PR to understand how they use public transportation and what are their needs.

The second step was looking at what was already on the market and how those solutions solved the user’s needs.

The information gathered on the first step allowed us to build some models to better visualize the pain points, propose solutions, find the “must have” functionalities and what could be done later. These informations are organized in a Value Canvas and in a Kano Model:

The public transportation users are a wide group of people, anyone in this group is a potential user, but we defined our main target as: young people between 18 and 35, medium wage, constantly using the smartphone for different things, with active social life, into trending stuff and who use public transportation for work and leisure.

• Goals and expectations: move on the public transportation network in an efficient way, taking help from precise and complete information.
• Pain points: inconsistency and lack of information from transportation authorities.
• Other products they use: Google Maps, Social Apps and games.
• Strategic functionalities: notifications about delays, near buses and live GPS. Notifications of when to get off and transfers in unknown routes, route calculation taking different perspectives of benefits such as: smaller price or fastest route (useful in big cities)

According to the strategy and user needs, the functionalities are:

• Check transport alternatives nearby
• Search for a location or route
• Favorite lines to get real time notifications
• Get notifications of an arriving bus
• Check line info such as: complete timetable, route on the map and ratings

The first prototypes were validated through user tests, the tests indicated some UX improvements to be done, so the user could have easier access to what was more important to them. These improvements resulted in the V.1

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Created in 2016, the first version of the layout took in consideration the Material Design Principles at the time

Created in 2021, the second version is an iOS adaptation and brings UX improvements such as “atomic design” to improve standardization on the elements and more modularity, refinements on the experience to show information more directly and improve the user flow and also new UI standards.