Project
KSU Mobile Bus Tracking Feature
Client
Kent State University | General Audience
What is Bus Tracking?
Kent State University’s 950 acre campus and the surrounding area is serviced by the Portage Area Regional Transit Authority (PARTA) Campus Bus Service. This service is instrumental in providing fast, reliable transportation for Kent State students to and from classes, work, and recreational activities, year-round. The KSUMobile team sought to provide riders with real-time data for bus locations so riding would become predictable and easy.
Briefing
KSUMobile is the official app for Kent State University students, staff, and faculty. With over 4,000 daily users and 70+ new users each day, it is an essential app for a variety needs; including class schedules, meal plan balances, checking grades, and email. In December 2016, a bus tracking feature was added to the application to provide additional value to students and staff traveling across campus. Its purpose is to track the busses’ locations in real-time and provided patrons with information about arrival times, bus stop locations and route information.
The initial release provided value to campus bus riders, however, upon closer look, riders were not happy with the interface, stating it was difficult or confusing to use. Additionally, there was significant feedback about the reliability of the data, which sometimes caused riders to miss the bus.
My Roles
User Research:
Survey
Ethnography
User-centered Design:
Journey Mapping
UI Design:
Wireframing
User Testing:
Usability Testing
Process
Survey
Shortly following the release of the bus tracker feature in December of 2016, the entire KSUMobile application was gearing up to move to the new OutSystems Mobile platform. I surveyed the university audience on their use, preferences, and satisfaction of the KSUMobile app to evaluate the existing features and design and to expose opportunities for improvement for the new version of the application. The survey, conducted in the spring of 2017, revealed significant discontent around the bus tracking feature that had been added in the months prior. App users complained about the interface, stating it was difficult to use, frustrating, and hard to understand. Users also stated the bus tracking was inaccurate, slow, and often reported no busses running, when in fact, they were.
“The live bus tracker is hard to use. Sometimes it tells me no busses are running when I know they are because I see them.”
-Anonymous Respondent
Usability
In response to the survey results, usability testing was conducted with four student participants. Two were experienced bus riders and two were inexperienced riders. We learned of several persistent usability issues including:
- All participants were unsure of how to learn the route of any given bus. Finding a route nearby to the user was especially difficult.
- Selecting a route was not intuitive. There was no signifier included in the UI.
- Several icons were not used in a manner consistent with participants’ expectations. For example, the location icon was used to show a list of bus stops that were nearby.
- View the pre-and post-design combined report.
Journey Mapping
Based on usability testing and subsequent interview, I created the following journey map to communicate the user experience of the current application and to demonstrate its weak points of both the UI and the data integration.
Redesign/Prototype Usability Testing
Following the redesign by the team’s UI designer, the high-fidelity prototype was retested with a new set of both experienced and inexperienced riders and it performed significantly better.
- Icons were updated as was the user flow.
- Riders that had no routes selected were first taken to the Route Selection to avoid viewing a blank, empty map screen.
- View the pre-and post-design combined report.
The revised bus tracking feature went live with the relaunch of KSUMobile in June of 2018, even though no changes were made to the PARTA data integration.
Survey & Ethnography
After the start of fall semester, I conducted a survey of incoming freshmen regarding the usage and satisfaction of KSU technology, and once again, students reported the bus tracker to be slow and unpredictable. I partnered with a mobile-team developer and together, we conducted an ethnographic research study that allowed us to understand where and when the data was problematic. We rode the busses, talked with drivers and students, and ultimately learned where the data was failing. Since then, the data integrations have been updated and arrival and departure times are much more accurate. The satisfaction survey will be conducted in spring of 2019 to evaluate the success of the improvements.
