Sprint 4: Context is Everything

Our team dove headfirst into research this sprint, each of us tackling a few methods in order to generate as many insights as possible prior to our prototyping phase. From interviews and ride-alongs to a diary study and a speculative design exercise, we’re awash with data and excited to start making sense of it all.

Top Insights

1. When passengers interact with the bus driver, they are mainly seeking help with wayfinding and route or schedule changes. This is the most common question passengers have for bus drivers.
2. The ways in which passengers’ seek information is widely variable, and depend on what that passenger deems will provide them with the quickest, most convenient, and most accurate information; some passengers identify these attributes with the bus driver, while others identify them with their phone.
3. Many people indicated that fellow passengers influence daily transit experiences even more than operators or drivers. Factors such as noise, crowding, or preferences toward sharing a seating area heavily affect people’s enjoyment of their journey.
4. People desire more feedback both inside and outside of their mode of transportation. Passengers often stated the lack of certainty on transit as one of the biggest downfalls and referenced live tracking and estimated times of arrival as information they sought out on various transportation journeys.

Express Mission Synthesis

In our last post, we gave an overview of our Express Mission where we tested early concepts for virtual attendants. Since the conclusion of the Express Mission, we went through all of the submissions from participants and started tagging keywords and ideas that were recurring from participant to participant. After sitting on a pile of themes, we decided to craft more hypotheses derived from the data collected. This led to six main characteristics:

1. The Skeptic — An identified characteristic of some participants who doubts the capabilities of emerging technologies.
2. The Help-Seeker — This is seen in participants who are excited about extra help or see the need for additional help — especially in new places, at night or unfamiliar routes.
3. The Security Guard — A characteristic of some participants who are concerned about privacy on public transportation.
4. The Sunflower — This characteristic is seen in participants who prefer and feel safer taking public transportation journeys during the day vs at night.
5. The Maze Runner — A characteristic that is seen in participants who are concerned about crowds and how they interfere with their accessibility to information.
6. The Shapeshifter — A characteristic in which participants prefer different modalities of assistance depending on the task.

Semi-Structured Interviews

In order to better understand passengers’ transit journeys, as well as passenger needs and expectations on these journeys, we conducted interviews with people who regularly take public transportation.

We interviewed many local Pittsburghers who we found through recruiting the old-fashioned way — posting fliers at bus stops! We also pulled from our local networks and made sure to speak with people who represent a range of ages, backgrounds, locations, and reasons for traveling.

Affinity mapping following our semi-structured interviews. We’ve identified emerging themes and insights that will inform our conceptual prototype.

What did we complete?

Our team spoke with 11 people, most of whom were in metropolitan areas because they have the most experience with public transit. They hail from all over the U.S., from San Francisco and Chicago to Pittsburgh, New York, and D.C.

What did we learn?

Several insights bubbled to the surface throughout these conversations, including:

1. When passengers interact with the bus driver, they are mainly seeking help with wayfinding and route or schedule changes. This is the most common question passengers have for bus drivers.
2. Passengers expect that bus arrival times are unpredictable and can be inaccurate. This is an accepted part of the journey, but can also lead to frustration and seeking alternative options.

Contextual Inquiries

So we’ve all ridden a bus before. But have we ever ridden a bus and really observed people’s behaviors, asking questions every step of the way? This is where contextual inquiries came in.

Our team rode alongside passengers on public buses in Pittsburgh to understand the explicit and unsaid needs that arise when people are on transportation and the typical activities and actions they undertake on a transit journey.

Conducting ride-along contextual inquiries with passengers on their typical commutes

What did we complete?

We completed ride-alongs with 4 passengers (with a 5th scheduled for this weekend!). We observed a wheelchair user commuting with his wife to a wedding; a patient care technician heading to the night shift in the early evening; a student running midday errands; and a suburban dweller on her early-morning commute into the city for work.

What did we learn?

1. The ways in which passengers’ seek information is widely variable, and depend on what that passenger deems will provide them with the quickest, most convenient, and most accurate information; some passengers identify these attributes with the bus driver, while others identify them with their phone.
2. Passengers seek out more interaction and information in unfamiliar situations; familiarity with a route leads to more independent journeys.
3. Most interactions with bus operators are reactions to unexpected situations, such as safety concerns or route changes; passengers rarely proactively interact with bus operators beyond greetings during a familiar and typical journey.

Participatory Design Exercise

We arranged chairs to shift our mindset into a more three-dimensional space and to test how our solutions would be impacted based on where we are sitting.

The goal of this method was to help us understand the users’ preference of modality for communication channels based on the physical restraints of a people mover. We decided on this method because — aside from contextual inquiries and diary studies — we’ve only been collecting data on what users would do rather than what they actually do. By creating an environment that simulates the physical constraints of a people mover and having our participants think within those confines, it allows them to generate ideas that are responses to the environment.

What did we complete?

So far, this method has been piloted with our faculty advisors and we are bringing it to 99P Labs to solicit feedback from our client before seeking external participants. The feedback we hope to receive would be initial reactions to the activity and how to encourage our participants to think outside of the box.

What did we learn?

Even though it is still in its pilot phase, we learned that a user’s positionality — a user’s position in relation to other users and touchpoints — plays a large role in receiving information.

Open Questions to answer from here

As we continue our research and further refine our insights from this phase of data collection, our team will continue to probe on unanswered questions. We will more specifically define the passengers’ for whom we are solving, answering questions such as:

1. What are the key pain points in a passengers’ transit journey?
2. What are their mental models’ in transit, and how might that impact their experience and behaviors?

We will also use our prototyping stage to explore the following questions:

1. What roles does an attendant play that are irreplaceable, if any? Is an attendant truly necessary? Can we reframe the term ‘attendant’ to something that would encompass more broad solutions, such as stop notifiers, ways of getting information, etc.?
2. What form will a virtual or non-human attendant take?
3. What interaction and access methods do passengers prefer for a virtual or non-human attendant? What small part of the transit journey could we impact with our work? How could we narrow our scope to do that one thing really well?

Sprint 5 Plans …

We have plenty more to do in the next two weeks! Here’s a glance at what we’re up to in Sprint 5:

• Visit 99P Labs: We’re so excited to meet our clients Erin & Joan and visit the 99P Labs office in Columbus, OH! We’re looking forward to engaging them in several ideation sessions, including a journey mapping exercise and a speculative design activity.
• Diary Study: We have launched our Diary Mission on dscout to 17 participants! Over the next 5 days, we’ll be collecting data about their transit journeys, which will further inform the insights we’ve found from this week’s work.
• Maps and Models: Data is nothing unless we can actually make sense of it all. We plan to build out a user experience map, persona empathy maps, and service blueprint to hone in on the opportunity areas for our prototype.
• Conceptual Prototype: It’s time to build something again! We’re putting pen to paper (and pixel to screen) next week, creating the first iteration of our virtual attendant solution.

We’ve got our work cut out for us, but with each new sprint, our ideas about virtual attendants, user journeys, and passenger mental models become more clear.