CU Sustainable Design: Bus map design
Fall 2017–Spring 2018 |Digital Product Design
Concept
Riding any form of public transportation is pretty convenient in college campuses or urban areas. This process affords us a faster and cheaper way to arrive places during busy schedules. Yet sometimes, maps can to be too complicated and difficult to understand, making the process a lot less efficient than helpful. I know this has definitely been the case for me with my university’s local public transportation company.
As a designer for the Cornell University Sustainable Design project team, I worked with a UX team of 5 to redesign the bus maps for TCAT, Cornell’s local bus company. Our goal was to create a map layout for better understanding and thus, more seamless bus riding.
My main role involved gathering and sorting the data behind reading the maps. Throughout the design process, I conducted many interviews in order to find main pain points and inform the design process, which I then contributed to from a consulting position.
My initial approach saw issues in low hierarchy of information and poor geographical connection of routes. From this, we created a mock design which joined routes together with cardinal turns to show geographical relations. And a hierarchy of colors and shapes helped indicate similarities and differences in routes.
Asking from the Source: User Research
To best understand the issues behind the usability of the maps, out team took to learning from the users themselves with an ethnographic approach. With Ithaca’s Apple Fest around the corner, the most popular city-wide event, I took advantage of the opportunity to interview people surrounding TCAT’s diverse user group: young and old; disabled and able-bodied; new to the routes and accustomed to the routes; frequent and non-frequent riders; etc.
We asked a series of questions including the following:
- What method do you use to find TCAT bus route information?
- What specific information do you search for when looking up a bus route?
- Do you have any issues when searching for TCAT buses?
Along with the interview, I asked users to identify which map they preferred between the current and mock design. About 14% felt that the current design did not met their needs the most due to:
- Overload of information
- Difficulty identifying important information
- Some text too small to read
- Difficult to visualize geographically
Our team’s hypothesis was correct in that the current map style has low geographical and hierarchal communication. In addition, there were further issues regarding visual presentation in both style and the amount of text.
Sorting the Information: Affinity Diagramming
Next, our team gathered information from all 30+ interviews into an affinity diagram, sorting all of the pain points into similar groups until we narrowed them down to the most recurring and pressing issues.
My role oversaw that all final placements were in the most accurate topics and that new sections were branched when necessary. I also ensured that all demographics were met in our interviews throughout this process.
The main identified issues we learned revolved around:
- Understanding the route order and direction
- Geographic relation of the route
- Knowing the actual location of the bus stops
- Accessibility of maps in bus stops
While many issues continued to back the map legibility problems we previously saw in our interviews, we found that only half of the issues regarded bus map legibility. The problems were broader than we originally thought.
One issue that was overlooked initially was the topic of distribution. While these maps may be recreated for better functionality, there would be no purpose of doing so if the users had no accessibility to the maps.
Another was the need for identifying the bus stops, both on the maps (to know the available stops in a route) and on the physical bus stop (when planning to board a bus). This attributed to labeling where bus stops are, but also knowing to identify them geographically.
Responding to the Issues: Designing
Based on the main issues, we started by developing proposed solutions for the issues:
Bus Map Design Solution
Our design process mainly focused on redesigning the but maps first since this proved the most vital issue.
The iteration process began with a focus on the geographical changes, which was met by creating sharp turns to reflect a north, south, east, and west more directly. We also overlapped similar routes, differentiated by gradients of black and white, and added more landmarks throughout the first two iterations.
After conducting more iterations of user-testing, I learned that stronger coloring further differentiated the routes. This also afforded adding more similar routes into one map. This is reflected in the third exploration above.
Another round of user-testing continued to prove that more geographical accuracy was vital for understanding the map. For this, we eventually merged the routes onto a more accurate map. While this continued to afford the color and multiple-route implementation, the number of routes was cut down to about three. This helped avoid overloading of information after we included the informational text in addition to the map background.
As we included more specific information about the route, we continued to maintain a similar layout to the older map so as not to create a drastic change requiring more adjustment. This would help ease the change management for current users.
Our eventual final proposal was one that involves the hierarchal, landmark, and geographical changes that proved vital. The underlying map is larger and more accurate, with arrows also added to explain route direction. Bolding of certain texts and borders, color differentiation, and text sizes show levels of important information. All secondary information is separated from the map by enough white space and has its own hierarchy of text sizes and shadows under the text boxes. Icons were implemented when most helpful to explain weekday, time of day, and information in the legend.
While all the other necessary information is also included, we ensured that the most prominent thing on the page is the map, which makes reading more efficient and decreases mental strain when reading. Additionally, the idea of placing related routes adjacent not only makes understanding easier by relating similar information into knowledge, but would help decrease the number of pages in a printed booklet in efforts of sustainability.
After further testing, this version proved to meet the issues of the previous map. Our team presented this solution to TCAT and are in the works of refining the design where necessary. While other smaller problems may continue to show up, we are still continually testing and including changes where necessary as long as the main solutions are not jeopardized.
Map Accessibility Solution
To make the maps more accessible, we are in the process of implementing bins in each stop to make map booklets easier to access. This has already been implemented inside each bus as well. While using booklets is not a very weather-proof or sustainable option, the booklets also include information on how to access the maps on the web.
As a team, we are also currently looking into ways to pin up related routes onto a bus stop’s wall. Challenges behind this are making this weather-proof in the most cost-efficient way, finding the best display method for routes with multiple related maps, and building for each type of material that the bust stops are made of.
Bus Stop Labeling Solution
This issue had two parts: the need for labeling on maps and physical stops. The first part was solved through our map redesign, as we included stronger text for each stop in a route and added arrows to show the order of the bus stops.
The second issue proved a bigger one, as this required separately designing effective signage. Luckily, an adjacent team in CUSD that was working specifically on the bus signs for TCAT had already looked into this issue before us, solving it for us through their design solution.
Conclusion and Future Plans
As these maps are further tweaked and installed, we hope to continue making changes to the way they are displayed and accessed by the community, especially considering the varied user groups from students to locals and visitors of Ithaca. Overall, these changes have shown milestones of improvement for the future of TCAT.
Lastly, there were also further issues we found that didn’t relate to TCAT’s bus maps which if I were to continue branching off this project, I would also look into. Throughout our interviews, we learned that TCAT’s bus cards tend to be treated as disposable, often being thrown out after a week despite being almost 3x as thick as NYC MTA subway cards. Another issue was that people have difficulty flagging down a bus at night after waiting in a bus stop in the dark. These two issues prove vital to the community and our environment, and I hope to have the chance to continue exploring them further.
