Reducing response time for delays in BEST buses with PAL
The digital dashboard solution for fleet tracking
Pal is our assistive dashboard created to track buses, maximize resource use and monitor daily depot operations to ensure on-time services.
🙋♀️Meet the team
- Gauri Chakravarti
- Medhini Venkatachalam
- Ayushi Shah
In 2023, as part of a college project on mass transit systems, we chose to work on BEST.
✒️My role
Research, System design, Visual design, UI flows and User testing, Copywriting, Prototyping, App redesign
🚦Let’s know more
Mumbai traffic has always been a cause of concern, as passengers often complain about irregular bus timings.
The long waits for passengers are a result of the shrinking fleet, which has affected bus frequencies.
📉Ridership has reduced by over 10 Lakhs in the last six years, signifying a drop in customer loyalty.
This case study looks into the age-old system’s widespread network that has ample scope for innovation and optimization.
⬇️The design process
🚍 Diving deep into the current system
We explored the existing depot operations to identify stakeholders and gaps in procedures.
Understanding our audience
We spoke to 3 depot managers, 5 assistant traffic officers, 8 drivers, and 6 conductors, to understand the chain of command and discovered that the depot manager would benefit the most from our intervention.
We also spoke to 10 regular and 2 new passengers of BEST
Zooming into the internal operations of BEST
We analyzed 2 primary work flows of management:
⚠️ System inefficiency:
The current procedures to assign and track routes are manual. This tends to be unreliable and tedious due to the possibility of human error.
⚠️ Communication gap:
Passengers are not informed about changes in routes, buses, and schedules and wait for long.
We discovered that the overall response time for operations between depots, buses and passengers is slow
This led us to define our opportunity statement
✨Our proposed solution, PAL
Here’s how PAL can assist the depot manager enhance services by:
- Reducing time to action to resolve delays
- Prioritizing resources efficiently
- Systematically assign routes to personnel
On a Monday morning, Mr. Subhash Gokhde, the dedicated manager of Santacruz Bus Depot, eagerly logs into PAL on his desktop for the first time. As he enters his Depot ID, his journey begins.
🚌The PAL Tour
Since current procedures are manual, introducing an FTUX (First Time User Experience) helps the depot manager learn essential daily tasks and easily navigate the dashboard.
After the onboarding, Mr. Gokhde begins his work on the home page. Here’s how it was designed for him.
🏠 The home page
🧑✈️ The depot manager can track all his operations at a glance here.
The home page, as a landing page, aimed to simplify tracking of bus arrivals and departures and highlight any delays.
The initial wireframes featured three main sections on a single page. These were arrivals & scheduled departures, a map and an overview of operations.
Why didn’t a single page work?
- The limited real estate made it difficult to understand complex information.
This ended up being our design constraint for the entire project
- Tracking a limited map area was not effective.
- The dashboard lacked depth in sections like the operations overview.
💡The Kanban inspiration
In this board, tasks move from one column to the next as you work on them. It helps you see what needs to be done, is in progress, and is finished in a work flow.
In the above wireframe, if a bus is delayed in “Departures” it moves to the “Delayed Departures” column.
✏️Designing the home screen
- Live schedule- to monitor arrivals and departures of buses
- Operations overview-to track resources and personnel
- Alerts and updates- to notify the manager of real-time actions
1. The live schedule
A dynamic schedule inspired by airport arrivals and departures breaks away from the conventional and tedious use of Excel sheets.
✅ Designing a schedule to accommodate multiple changes, decision points, and actions was difficult, but we discovered that appropriately chunking information solved our problem.
2. The “Leaving Late” cards
The concept of “Leaving Late” highlights what delays need to be prioritized.
💡Our challenge was to balance the amount of information the depot manager needed to make a decision.
✅The final card design shows relevant information that prompts quick action.
3. The operations overview
Tracking daily operations, this section gives the manager a sense of accomplishment. Alerts and updates keep him aware of real-time actions.
✅Resource representation is more intuitive, aiding decision-making in different contexts.
The Final Home Page
In the final design, we prompt the depot manager to fix delays while optimizing resources.
Let us consider a typical scenario at the Santacruz Depot
🕟A bus is delayed,
The depot manager, Subhash Gokhde, notices that the Bus on route 231, going from Juhu Bus station to Santacruz depot is arriving 25 minutes late.
This would affect the next bus scheduled to leave on this route, making passengers wait longer.
🧑✈️ Mr. Gokhde must prioritize resolving this for smooth operations
There are two ways to do this based on the buses available:
- Assign a new bus and driver (if available)
- Reassign another bus to the delayed route (if a new bus is not available)
Why prioritize a delay?
Let’s look at a usual scenario,
Assuming there are a total of 6 buses in a depot,
With only 1 bus available to handle 3 potential delays, the depot manager must prioritize which delay to address first, based on the following information available:
- Delayed time of departure
- Frequency and type of route
- Expected passenger count
- Passenger demand on route
- Capacity of live buses to pick up the passenger load
💡To optimize resource usage, we considered the potential of live buses having overlapping routes picking up waiting passengers. This helps the depot manager prioritize when he should take action.
Resolving the delay with PAL
What happens when Mr. Gokhde clicks on “view details”?
We considered 2 approaches to relay information:
❌1. Modals
For a more focused approach, we used modals in our initial designs to reveal bite-sized information progressively.
This was done based on data points we determined were necessary in each step.
Why were modals not the suitable approach?
⚠️ The manager needed to review a lot of information simultaneously before deciding to assign a bus.
- The flow was not intuitive, as users were not able to comprehend data and anticipate the next steps.
- Complex copywriting made it difficult to understand the task.
✅ 2. A single page — our breakthrough!
The page presents information simultaneously, ensuring all decision-making factors are visible at once.
💡Our overall focus is on providing the manager with all the data needed to make a well-informed decision and simpler copywriting
Having gone through the entire dashboard, our depot manager can now confidently use PAL!
Our dashboard is designed to ultimately improve passenger experience, whose primary interaction with the system is the CHALO app partnered with BEST.
Let’s see how our dashboard design can positively impact the experience of the app.
Looking from the passenger’s point of view…
❓ Concerns a BEST passenger has about the service
Implementing these into CHALO….
The home screen
Let’s say, Rahul wants to go to Santacruz Station East,
⚠️ A ticket on CHALO needs to be activated by the conductor’s ATVM machine which is difficult to do when the bus is overcrowded
We need a system where activating the ticket is not necessary,
⚠️First-time riders in an unfamiliar area often struggle to keep track of bus stop names and need clarification about their destination.
📍Now, passengers can be guided through their trip from start to end and provide feedback about the experience.
Thus, the above design creates a “track my trip” experience for both, daily and new riders.
📈Metrics to track success
- Increased on-time performance — a higher percentage of buses that depart and arrive on time as per schedule.
- Higher number of delays resolved — more delays resolved now compared to before using PAL.
- High resource utilization rates — increasing the percentage of time resources are active compared to their total available time.
💡Learnings from our experience
- Copywriting for your audience:
It is important to know the language your audience speaks. - Using the right information to prompt an action:
When dealing with a lot of data, it is important to prioritize what information the user needs to see to prompt an action. - Understanding the current system’s workflows:
Regular interviews with various levels of BEST management offer valuable insights into organizational structure and responsibilities.
Thank you for reading ✨
It means a lot to me as a writer, if you have any questions or suggestions, Do get in touch with me:
✉️gauri.chakravarti@gmail.com
💼You can know more about me at Gauri Chakravarti’s Portfolio
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Fin.
