Here are 3 ways to make the Public Transport System better for everyone!

4 min readApr 15, 2018

Good click-bait title huh?

I’ll be discussing about the SBS project that I did for my User Experience Immersive course in General Assembly on improving UX for SBS website.

The task, you ask?

Improve the website to serve commuters better as a responsive website.

The current state of SBS website has many issues regarding navigation, interaction and simple functions

For example, Journey Planner on the front page is not clickable!

To first understand how to improve this situation of the website and its’ functionality, we had to understand the Bus Contracting Model (BCM) in order to fully grasp how SBS makes money and how we add value to their current operations.

In essence, Singapore government owns and handles the majority of the bus planning with the control of the assets. SBS has to perform to meet certain performance standards and if they fail to, they’ll get a deduction from their payroll.

This Shon, one of our users that I interviewed to find out his experience in using the public transport and the different contexts that he uses apps and websites to help him with his journey.

From all our user interviews, we gathered the data and consolidated them to find a common trend amongst the different interviewees.

From this, we found the 3 main areas of focus:

Task 1

We added the ‘Live disruption notice’, ‘Travel time and fare’ and ‘First/Last train information’.

With these, we created a comprehensive MRT planner that allowed users to navigate their train journey easily.

Task 2

We added a bus guide info function where the users can find the nearby locations and if they click on the bus stop, it’ll highlight on the map accordingly.

This was often an issue with many apps that our users had and this was our solution.

On the bus stop, we added the list of buses with the colours indicating the different vacancies of the buses.

Red — Full

Yellow-Standing available

Grey-Seats available

You’d think, why not put green for seats available?

That was our thought process but the current users through our usability testings said that green was associated with ‘arriving’ buses and therefore was confusing for them. Due to the implemented association of green, there was no need to change the user behaviour.

Task 3

For the journey planner, we added the time taken for the journey, which the users have expressed was more important than the distance.

In addition, our users expressed that they expect more options than just buses on the Journey Planner on the SBS website therefore we added MRT options as one of them.

We added a function where the users can click on the bus stop to find the walking directions to the selected bus stop because the current situation did not allow the users to do both in the same app.

In addition, instead of the usual user behaviour where one will go to the bus guide to check the list of bus stops before alighting, we implemented the feature to show the last 3 bus stops before their bus stop to be alighted.

With these features in mind, we still had to improve our website so here is how we readjusted our Information Architecture to best suit the user needs.

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