Background
One fine morning my school friend who is a developer received a call from our senior teacher who mentioned that the school is planning to develop a bus tracking app for parents and their children and they wanted some alumni of our school to build the app.
My friend got in contact with me to discuss it and we decided to take this project. I was to work as a designer.
The first meeting with the school
The first meeting was with the IT department and the principal of the school to discuss their expectations and the scope.
- School wanted a simple bus tracking app. They didn’t have anything specific in their mind except the basic live tracking feature. They gave us the room to come up with the features for the app.
- Since the school has only 2 owned buses and rest were rented from the government the possibility to install GPS tracking devices were not possible. The bus driver or the bus itself was subject to change
- The GPS source by the device of the bus attendant appointed by the school for each bus route. The bus attendant is the first one to enter the bus in the morning and the last one to leave in the afternoon.
- The price would be included in the transportation cost of the students which is taken from the fees itself. So students who don't use the transport will not use this app
User-centred design process
Since I was the only designer on the project I took care of the UX and the visual designing. I used a design thinking approach to solve the problem.
User Research
The main motive of my research was to:
1. Understand the morning and afternoon routine & activities of parents and children while getting ready for the school
2. Identify the problems parents face because of their child’s school transport and have how they manage to solve it currently.
- Ethnographic interview
I got a chance to conduct an ethnographic interview with one of my relatives who were parents to a girl who goes to school. My aim was to silently observe their morning routine on how they prepare themselves and the child to get ready for the school to the time their child comes back home in the afternoon.
Key observations from the ethnographic interview
- Parent(s) have a fixed time to get up and a fixed time to wake up their kid and get them ready for the school. They know the approximate time the bus will arrive at the stop and also have a fixed time at which they have to leave their house to reach the bus stop. Similarly in the afternoon
- Parents have a continuous look at their clock to keep track of the time so that they don’t miss the bus.
2. Telephonic interview
I conducted 4 telephonic interviews with parents who had kids going to school. Two of them had kids going to the primary section while rest 2 had children going to the senior school
Some of the key insight/pain points of the parent and the student from the telephonic interview
- Sometimes the bus is late and parents have no idea about it as there is no proper channel for communication. Parents contact other parents or contact the school.
- Sometimes the bus breakdowns and it does not arrive at the stop on time. The parents have to wait or contact other parents or the school, there is a lot of to and fro in this process.
- On a special occasion where the bus have different timings parents have to call the school and enquire about the bus or sometimes the school needs a confirmation whether the student needs the bus or not.
- Some students are the only one at their stop so if they miss the bus they have no clue that they might know about it. Sometimes they are informed by other parents of different school who share the same bus stop.
- Since there are a lot of activities to do in the morning students sometimes forget to pack the things in their bag so sometimes they have to run to get the things back to the home.
- In the afternoon sometimes the parents are unable to pick up their student they contact the other parents of the school or some relatives by.
- Parents are concerned about the security of their child so they want information about when the bus has reached the school and when the bus will arrive in the afternoon so that parent can reach the bus stop on time to pick their child.
2. Define
The next step was to translate all the needs of the parents-students into features and then follow the red route method to finalize the features.
User flow
I developed a flow that allows for seamless and cohesive user experience without dead ends.
The main thought behind the user flow was that how can the parent & child see the bus route/ETA as soon as possible on landing on the app without any extra click because that is an action that parent/student would be doing every day.
Ideation & Wireframes
By now I have already gathered enough information to get started with the wireframes. I started of on paper to explore some quick ideas and then decided to do mid-fidelity on XD when I finalized it on paper.
Mid-fidelity on XD
Visual Experience Design
Before starting the VD there were few things that I considered, which are
UI Screens
In the below screens, I have given a visual separation for when the bus is about to reach the stop(Green) and when the bus has left the stop (Blue) so that the user can easily understand that the bus has left the stop without reading the content on the screen.
The below screen shows the flow of sharing the route.
The below screens shows the notification and the message screens
1. I created a visual separation between morning and evening notification settings to reduce the cognitive load on the users.
Interactions
