My Role
I was part of a team and responsible for the research, interaction design, visual design, branding and enhancing the business model for the transport experience.
The challenge
Supporting Bus Driver community for better transport experience
The goal for the project was to identify the issues and improve the transportation experience in Helsinki. Initially, the idea as a team was simple to focus on commuters using different modes of transportation like the bus, train and tram and understand their pain-points. The thought was to create a strong foundation that keeping the commuters in mind that helped embraced the evolving business and more diverse user base.
Kick-off
Picking up the pieces
At the outset of the project we didn’t have a clear mission or specific goal for the issues we wanted to solve. Without pre-existing insights, we did a lot of observational studies and impromptu user interviews to understand their feeling when travelling in different scenarios.
The research gave us the insight that the commuters were pretty happy with the system, their problems were trivial which they encountered once a while. However, we realised the problem existed with the users interacting internally within the system. Bus drivers were one of the core users of the system who faced quite a lot of issue and stress within the system. Hence, our goal was to understand the challenges the drivers faced.
Early Insights from the Field
We conducted user interview, surveys and did observational studies of bus drivers across Helsinki and Espoo region in Finland. For our observational studies we travelled in the buses on different routes nothing how the drivers interacted with the passengers and in their environment.
With the insights from the aforementioned research, we identified the drivers facing issue and concerns in socialising and communicating within their community. Also, the uncertainty of whether their problems and concerns were being by the authority due to very slow response rate was the key issue which every driver struggled with in their daily work schedule. This resulted in them feeling not being valued.
To delve deeper into the problem we created the value proposition canvas of the bus driver and the commuters to further understand and map their pain-points, gains and goal.
Deep insights
Driver need to be treated equally
I was surprised by the issues we found. Though the bus drivers loved driving, were professionals and had valuable tacit knowledge, there were basic employment privileges that they were being deprived of. But after some thinking, it became clearer that bus rivers expected the experience to just work keeping their basic safety and needs in mind.
The power users with great reception, powerful phones and tech literacy were having trouble communicating within the community and raising their concerns to the supervisors. The research revealed an opportunity to perfect the driving experience and help the company provide better services.
Working Backwards from Perfect
Before I could jump into the designing, it was important to define success and understand the health of the current issue reporting structure within the company and the means of communication and it’s frequency within the community.
Currently the communication within the community was only through Facebook group or their local break meetings. Also, to raise their concerns the drivers were required to fill forms or call and report through customer care.
Most Complaints go unheard
Digging into the data revealed some big insights into the driver support experience and their daily routine. Almost all trips involved some extra spontaneous issue management along the route which resulted in delays and affected their performance and pay scale. For example, Finding a pot hole along the route or a drunk commuter creating a scene resulted in delay along the route which the driver could not inform the company about and it affected it’s performance.
"Data showed that driver needed to often multi-task while driving which was a huge cognitive load on them."
Also, the drivers needed a quick, easy and fun data structure to know about their daily driving performance and to keep them motivated.
The time and energy spent recovering during problematic situation was having a material impact on the business and the drivers. Delays in route and bad driving performance translates directly into extra fuel consumption, more annoyed drivers and it resulted in more pollution and the cost to anonymise.
The solution
Visualising end-to-end
After doing research, interviews, analysis and the required actions, we came up with solution which focused on ways to alleviate the problems that bus drivers face by leveraging the things that motivate them in their work.
"Engaging bus drivers without adding to their workload and providing benefit to all the stakeholders making our public transportation system more attractive and satisfactory."
We used experience mapping technique to visualise and communicate the users end-to-end experience across various touch-points. This allowed us to represent user pain-points and see where we needed to focus our attention. Also, making the business model canvas helped us in understanding the positive impact it could also bring for the businesses involved when executing the solution.
Storytelling about the ideal experience
Knowing who exactly I was designing for allowed me to ask myself how the app fits into the lives of the users. I imagined ideal experiences and focused on how our personas think and behave rather than getting into specifics about interfaces, technologies or business goals.
Keeping the scenarios at a high‐level allowed us to work fluidly and explore concepts that we could easily communicate with our team and mentors. They formed the backbone of our requirements, and allowed us to express these from both a functional and emotional perspective allowing for further empathy with our users.
The framework
We defined the overall structure of the experience. Through sketching and storyboarding, I generated stacks of ideas about the concept, arrangement of UI, functional and data elements, and interactive behaviours. Starting broad, our vision began evolving into something tangible. A high‐level design language, interactions and the app's anatomy began to piece together.
Since our user segment was more comfortable with their own regional language it was a challenge to put together the content and Finnish in the screens. I sat together with my other Finnish team members to design the content structure in Finnish that would appear in the app.
Mobile Prototyping with Invision
Invision proved to be the best tool of choice for rapid prototyping. Because of the tight timeline we chose to develop a high-fidelity prototype. It was a powerful tool in creating transparency in our design process. Our what you see is what you get approach strengthened the understanding of our concept with our mentors and allowed us to gain feedback and approval from both our our mentors and the bus drivers.
Link to the Invision https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/Q7IUFQKN9RM#/screens/297957000
Detailed Design
Reinforcing good driving performance; Show drivers that their feedback is hear; Enable drivers to help each other; Encourage improvement and learning.
The refinement
Testing with the Users
It was very difficult getting face-t-face interviews with the bus drivers due to their busy schedules and shifts. Also, Because of time limitation, we decided to use video to communicate the app’s interaction and transitions. The transitions and interactions in the app were chosen to strike a balance between reinforcing context and creating an engaging and compelling interface. Therefore, we tried and tested our mobile prototype by scheduling appointments and also through sending our prototype video to their Facebook group to gain their feedback on the same.