Efficiently managing and taking control of your daily commute.
Journey+ is a transportation app that assise you in improving your repetitive and boring commuter life.The app provides live updates, a report section, experience options, and a social aspect. Make best use of your time and more enjoyable in your commute life.
Office workers who commute in a regular pattern using multiple modes of public transport each day.
Their commuting life can be repetitive, time-consuming, inconvenient and worst of all, subject to unexpected delays.
The solution was designing a mobile phone application to allow the user to avoid delays, shared routes to enable social connections and options to encourage alternative experiences during the commute.
The project began with the user interview to better understand our demographic. The team has conducted 18 semistructured interviews based on their experience.
The people we interviewed were all professionals, working full-time in office-based settings. Many lived in the mid- or outer suburbs of Sydney and commuted for between 1-2 hours per day. They had busy schedules and often left their homes early in the morning to try to avoid the worst of the traffic. Most of the interviewees were very proficient with technology, and often used additional devices such as laptops, headphones or smart watches during their commutes.
My role here was to create an interview script with the team and conduct three interviews on my own in person to gather the necessary data for the project research.
*This is a case project that I’ve been involved in. In some parts, I’ve done my work on my own, and in other parts of it, I’ve done it with the team.
The finding was drawn out through affinity diagramming upon collecting my own three interview data. This led me to understand and discover the user's desire and fear to develop the project.
Throughout user research, I have analysed the data to determine a user that is a representative demographic, as seen in the persona below.
Isabella is 28 years old, a full-time office worker, and must be at the city office three days a week. She commutes for an average of 1.5 hours per day via multiple modes of transport. She feels her commute could be more varied. She cannot do anything when stuck in traffic, particularly making her feel anxious when travelling in peak time with crowdedness.
From the research, the journal highlights the time "before, between and after the commute" in the morning travelling to work often contributes to office workers feeling frustrated and anxious.
Upon the research, we understood the pain points of the user commute experience, which led us to explore different ideas for the solution. Therefore, we focus on the feature that improves the lives of office workers through several other avenues, all of which aim to reduce the stressors and increase the enjoyment of specific experiences associated with daily commuting:
- Providing users with the most up-to-date information will allow them to navigate around network delays, or prepare for the relevant weather conditions along their route.
- By facilitating social connections through the ability to easily meet up with friends at a mutually convenient location along their usual route.
- By encouraging users to explore other parts of their urban area that they might not know about, e.g. parks, and restaurants, thereby improving physical and mental health, and supporting local businesses.
Through the ideation sessions, the team has converged on developing a mobile phone application that would:
- Improve the experience of unexpected delays and weather conditions.
- Maintain and broaden their social connectivity by - spending quality time with friends with similar commutes.
- Encourage users to get out and explore new and exciting cultural experiences and beautiful natural areas within their city.
Our team’s prototype application Journey+ comprises over 50 frames, with three distinct user flows.
The prototype has been designed using Figma and may be viewed using the Figma app on a smartphone or computer. The full prototype is currently designed to run on iPhone 13 Pro Max only. However, we envision that future development would also allow the Journey+ app to be run on Android devices as well as iOS.
Additionally, and whilst not included as part of the prototype, we also intend that the app could be connected to a smartwatch in order to allow for haptic reminders, or used with Bluetooth headphones/earphones to allow for audio cues.Journey+ is also designed to utilise the Transport for NSW Open Data API, in order to provide real-time transport data.
Testing was conducted using mid-fidelity wireframes with three participants.
Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics evaluation was used to evaluate the Journey+ prototype because it allows for early detection of any usability flaws in the prototype. This is beneficial as it helps with the iterative process and saves time in the future. The identification of these flaws early on raises awareness of the criticality and complexity of these concerns. It is also well known to detect minor problems that usually go unnoticed during experience testing (Nielsen 1994).
The main goal of conducting the usability test was for the participant to experience the Journey+ prototype from the perspective of a user in order to identify any flaws that violated Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics.
The prototype was designed with the team, and I was in charge of the experience and social aspect section.
My role here was to role plays our group persona in action and edit the video after the shot. The same three scenarios were this time, enacted in real-life situations closely aligned to the User Experience Stories:
- While travelling on the train/bus/light rail
- Check the app at the office or while walking in the park.
