Mobile Design · Digital Product Design · UX Design
Alleviate the Safety and Unpredictability Concerns about Commute on NYC Public Transit
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Commuting on public transit has consistently posed a challenge for both newcomers and lifelong residents in New York City. The city's public transit system is notorious for its unpredictable incidents, causing frustration among commuters. Following thorough primary research, our team identified numerous opportunities to enhance the overall transit experience in NYC through the utilization of mobile apps. The resulting app, SUBWAZE, boasts three key features: a map view with live travel updates, incident viewing and reporting capabilities, and trip alert scheduling and customization options. User testing revealed a significant likelihood of widespread app adoption, given its potential to mitigate the inherent unpredictability of NYC public transit by providing users with real-time information. This empowers users to travel in NYC with confidence and without stress.
👩🏫 Role
⌛ Timeline
UX Designer
Oct 2023 – Jan 2024
👩🏫 Team
🎨 Deliverable
Jennie Lin
Gatha Bhakta
Michelle Huang
Bryony Hoare
Figma Prototypes
Design Process
🔍 Define
Identify the core problems they face when commuting
💭 Ideate
Brainstorm the solutions from devices to features
🪢 Iterate
Examine and iterate the proposed solutions with real NYC commuters
📱 Prototype
Visualize the final product after iterations
🎨 Deliver
Examine and deliver the final solutions for NYC commuters
Understanding commuters in NYC
🫶 Empathize
Emphathize and Define
How might we provide a way for Emma to feel safe and stress-free when she commutes on the MTA?
Thinking about personal commute experience can always be stressful for everyone in NYC. Public transit in NYC has been notorious for a long time. Starting from personal experience, we attempted to seek solutions to alleviate this common concern among NYC commuters and ease everyone’s trip. To reach this goal, we conducted our initial user research through survey and interviews.
Exploring the Commuter Experience: Unveiling Insights and Enhancing Transit Solutions
📄 Survey
Conducted with 38 respondents, our survey delved into user experiences with an incident report and alert app tailored for NYC public transit, revealing intricate pain points and navigation hurdles within the urban commuter landscape.
🎯 About incidents on public transit
90% of them have experienced recent train delays (2 weeks);
79% of them have dealt with incidents on public transit.
🎯 About reporting the incidents
66% of them open to reporting incidents
80% of them have interest in learning about incidents
🎤 Interview
In our user research interviews for the incident report and alert app designed for NYC public transit, we engaged with 7 participants spanning a spectrum of experience levels, from lifelong commuters to those newly acquainted with NYC, uncovering nuanced insights into user needs and expectations across diverse transit backgrounds.
🎯 Frustration 1: Sense of unsafe from people around
“I feel the constant need to be vigilant and be aware of all her surroundings on train.”
🎯 Frustration 2: Inaccurate schedule of the train
“I try to look at directions a day ahead of time.”
🎯 Frustration 3: Unhelpful existing incidents resources
“X is also very helpful but the tweet updates are not useful due to the same time gap during delays.”
Charting the Transit Terrain: A Market Analysis of Safety Apps in NYC Public Transit
Our comprehensive analysis of both direct and indirect competitors comprised a Lightning Demo and a thorough Competitive Analysis, enabling us to discern the critical features warranting prioritisation.
Competitive analysis
Lightning demo
Identified from the existing safety app market, three significant gaps drove our design approach, aiming to distinguish our solution by effectively bridging these disparities.
🗾 Map products
No incident updates during the real time navigation on public
🚨 Safety products
Complicated report process and missing incident resources
🚆 Public transit products
Lack of predictive features for potential upcoming problems
Candid Insights: Persona Portrait and Subway Saga – Navigating NYC Commuter Experiences
Based on these research, we crafted a persona representing a typical NYC commuter navigating the subway system, capturing their demographics, behaviours, and pain points. Additionally, we developed a user journey map illustrating the commuter's experiences from planning their journey to encountering incidents, highlighting key touchpoints and opportunities for app integration to enhance their transit experience.
👤 Persona
🌬 Journey Map
Spotlighting Struggles: Unveiling NYC Commuters' Core Concerns
👿 Unpredictability of public transit status and incidents
🙀 0 sense of safety when riding the NYC public transit
Ideate
Handy mobile solutions for commuters: Live incident updates, Incident report community and pre-planned trip alerts
Define the structure
Based on our research, we compiled several primary features to prioritize for this product.
Prioritisation
SCAMPER
Given the pain points from our target users and the existing gaps among the current market, the features we wanted to prioritize the most were:
💡 Live incident updates
We could add a layer of safety for commuters by providing instant and intuitive safety notifications.
💡 Incident report and community
Commuters are provided with an integrated way to report and get informed about incidents nearby.
💡 Scheduled trip alerts
we wanted commuters to feel less burdened by last minute change of transit incidents before they depart.
Construct the product SUBWAZE
With a set of features in mind, we thought about how commuters can access different types of safety notifications. We attempted to create a clear structure of the product and simplify the flow to ensure the information’s timely delivery.
🏠 Information Architecture
🌊 User Flow
Flow 1: Live trip & incident updates
Flow 2: Report an incident and view it in Community
Flow 3: Schedule a trip and manage trip status alerts
Think through solutions
📝 Sketching out the ideas
With a focus on three key aspects from the user flow, we began to sketch out the potential ideas for our flows: accurate live alerts, simple report and predictable trips.
1️⃣ We thought about the visualisation of live navigation with incident alerts. We sought the information balance when providing thorough content while avoiding overload. We prioritized the navigation but ensured the information hierarchy when incident pushes appeared.
2️⃣ We explored how the report flow could be accessed and used simply and easily for users. We settled on separating the help resources and reporting features.
3️⃣ We tested different ways of navigation to ensure function clarity at first glance. We placed the three primary features in the bottom navigation for intuitive access.
📐 Forging the functionality - mid-fi prototypes
Following the conceptualisation phase of sketching, the mid-fi stage involves transforming initial ideas into more polished and interactive prototypes, allowing for further refinement and user feedback before proceeding to higher fidelity iterations.
Mid fi prototypes
Iterating
Key iteration: Provide more flexibility in incident alert customisation to avoid unnecessary safety panicking
We engaged in a design critique session with peer designers who are residents of NYC and utilize the MTA on a daily basis, followed by comprehensive testing of the app prototypes with a cohort of 8 diverse NYC commuters, ensuring thorough iteration and refinement for optimal user experience in the context of the bustling urban transit landscape.
Stoplight chart from user testing
1️⃣ The rainbow chart highlighted the smooth flow of the live transit + incident updates feature.
👍 Great simplicity and information hierarchy regarding design:
“The overall layout is clean, with a consistent use of fonts and spacing.”
👍 Intuitive colour codes for all traffic elements:
“I like using different color show the different trains.”
2️⃣ Compared to the first feature, reporting feature seemed less intuitive. The overall flow was easy to follow as it had the progress bar, while users got stuck by the confusing labels and icons.
“What is the difference between report and incident. Incidents would mean he would get to know about other incidents.”“The confirmation/verification button is not intuitive. I am not sure what they mean.”
To reduce confusion, we examined all labels and icons and replaced misleading ones.
E.g., To avoid ambiguity between ‘Incidents’ and ‘Report’, the ‘Community’ is used to emphasize that it is an informational repository.
Before: 3 tabs bottom nav - incidents & report
After: bottom nav + btn - Separate report & incident community
3️⃣ The more problematic flow was the trip alert scheduling. The issues happened on several aspects.
❓Somewhere hidden in the app, hard to discover:
“I click a lot of the notification options before noticing the safety section.”
❓Feel extra stressful and constantly anxious for getting all different types of incident alerts:
“I am pessimistic to constantly get the info about somewhere I go regularly. That’s depressing.”
Since I was responsible for this flow, these two key perspectives drove me to re-organize the information architecture. We bring out the scheduling feature to a more shallow layer – on the homepage so that users will be able to intuitively get it and manage their trips in advance.
Besides, instead of assuming all alerts will be pushed, the trip alerts are customisable to avoid constant anxiety and depression about travelling on NYC public transit. We want to ensure to intension and atmosphere of the app is helpful and optimistic.
Before: alerts all auto on
After: customize alerts
Deliver the Final Design
Entering the pinnacle phase of design delivery, the transition to high-fidelity prototypes marks the culmination of iterative refinement, where the vision for the NYC transit safety app transforms into polished, immersive experiences, ready for presentation and implementation.
🧑🎨 Style Guide
The style guide laid a solid foundation for the high-fi prototypes. Since the product is rooted in NYC, we incorporated rats and modern elements to represent NYC vibes and showcase our uniqueness from the market.
📱 Hi-fi prototypes
The final hi-fidelity prototypes are designed according to three key flows:
Flow 1: Live trip & incident updates
Flow 2: Report an incident and view it in Community
Flow 3: Schedule a trip and manage trip status alerts
Envision the Future
Although we did not conduct further user testing, we gathered highly positive feedback from the final design critique from mainly two perspectives. Our app stood out from the competitors with our unique incident alerts feature, and it successfully addressed the user pain points of unpredictability and insecurity.
There is still much room to further improve in terms of user interfaces and the whole product structure. By improving these aspects, SUBWAZE is more likely to get firm user base and more feasible as a public transit safety solution.
1) More unique New York style
Although we applied some NYC related elements in the current design, the visual can be more NY-ish stylized.
2) Reliable incident validation
The current validation mechanism is community member based. The more people verify one incident post, the more trustful one incident gets.
3) Instant emergency state
Despite the consideration at the initial ideation stage, we didn’t incorporate it in our key user flows design. However, the emergency feature remains crucial to be included in any safety app.