Developing user personas for the new MBTA website
One of the many interesting parts about working on a new website for the MBTA is how purely human-centric the site can be. The site’s function is not for selling a service or product; its primary purpose is to provide quality information and updates to MBTA customers, whether it’s the Saturday commuter rail schedule or the cost of a bus ride.
Our team is constantly thinking about different challenges MBTA riders face and how we can go about providing them with contextual, real-time information via our website. In order to ensure we build the new site around the needs of the people who actually use it, we’ve created three personas that characterize our typical riders.
Defining a persona forces you to think about who you are solving for, what their challenges are when using your product, and what they are trying to accomplish. In the rest of this post, I’m going to explain how we decided on our three personas and how they’ve been helping our team in our design and developmental process.
Who uses the MBTA?
The first step in determining personas was to think about those who use the MBTA and how they interact with it. The MBTA averages about 1.3 million rides a day — 1.3 million! The people that account for these rides are a mix of both frequent and infrequent users of the commuter rail, subway, bus, and ferry. We needed to come up with more than just one rider archetype.
I established two kinds of “frequent” users and an “infrequent” user:
- People who rely on the MBTA solely for their commute.
- People who rely on the MBTA for getting almost everywhere — from going to work, to buying their groceries, to getting to a doctor’s appointment, and beyond.
- People who may be coming to Boston from another city, state, or country who use the MBTA to get to different destinations on their city visit.
Why the distinction in frequent users?
- Those who completely rely on multiple modes of transportation to get places throughout their day have a different relationship with public transit than those who only use it for their work commute.
- Those only commuting to and from work on public transit are more likely to be familiar with the commuter rail, while those who use it throughout their day are more versed in using multiple bus routes or subway lines. Each mode of transportation is unique in how it operates, what its schedules are like, and the types of system changes it is affected by.
From here I developed our three main personas: Lisa the City Dweller, Bob the Commuter, and Rachel the Tourist (you can find the full personas at the very bottom of this post):
How do they experience the MBTA?
It was important to think critically about each of these personas’ experiences with the MBTA, so I used this set of questions as a guide:
- What modes of transportation are they using?
- What do they know already about the MBTA? What are their information needs?
- What challenges do they face with the MBTA and communication about MBTA service?
- What are their goals?
In order to answer these questions I relied on the research we’ve done to learn more about MBTA riders’ habits and what they are coming to our site for:
- We asked a percentage of visitors to our current website for feedback on the site and what brought them there.
- Our team also refers to web analytics to see the pages people are visiting.
- We launched a survey to regular MBTA riders to learn more about how they use schedules, alerts, and real-time information to plan their commutes.
- We interviewed both regular MBTA riders and people less familiar with the system to learn more in depth about what their experiences have been and where things may have been lacking.
- We tested early prototypes with a range of users, from people who are very familiar with the MBTA system to tourists with little to no knowledge of the system at all.
This has helped us learn about the information people need the most and the setbacks they are currently experiencing when trying to find it.
Connecting the personas to the design
One of our goals is to make the information MBTA riders need as easily accessible to them as it can be. As we discuss possible features and designs, we refer back to our personas — would this help Lisa? How would she use it? Is this something Rachel would understand and if not, how should it be changed? This helps us sort out our thought process around potential features by having a clearer picture of the large and extremely diverse MBTA ridership.
The final product…
Persona #1: Lisa the City Dweller
Persona #2: Bob the Commuter
Persona #3: Rachel the Tourist
Are you interested in helping to improve the MBTA website?
We’re constantly looking for feedback from our users to make sure the new site is as intuitive and helpful as possible. Please email ct@mbta.com with your contact information if you are interested in testing the site and giving us valuable feedback!
So, what’s next?
Over the next couple of months our team will continue to keep Lisa, Bob, and Rachel in mind as we push out new features and iterate on old ones.
Stay tuned to learn more about our team, our process, and updates on the new website.
