A New Morning Commute: Redesigning Metrorail’s Website

Rebecca Grant
Aug 9, 2017 · 5 min read

WHY METRORAIL?

I’ve been using the Metrorail to get around the city since I was a kid. If you’ve lived in Miami for most of your life like I have, you’ve probably noticed that the roads are getting more and more congested with traffic each year. I think Miami would be a much more pleasant place to get around if more people took advantage of the public transportation our city offers.

Government websites are notoriously difficult to use. They’re outdated, text-heavy, and make simple tasks difficult by burying important links in hard to find places. I wanted to challenge myself to tackle the usability problems facing the transit website as it exists today.

Can someone tell me who thought this would be a good idea?

USER NEEDS + PAIN POINTS

First, I wanted to get an idea of how, when, and why people use the Metrorail. I sent out a survey to Miami residents and collected 61 responses.

(1 being “Not Very Likely” and 5 being “Very Likely”)

I was surprised to find that even though Miami residents primarily used their cars to get around, the majority supported an increase in funding for public transportation.

“I couldn’t help but wonder, if so many people are supportive of public transportation, why aren’t they using it?

My survey results gave me some insight into their current behaviors, but I still needed to find out what guided these behaviors.

Unsurprisingly, finding people who use public transportation regularly in Miami wasn’t easy. I focused on finding the so-called “choice riders.” That is, users that have other options besides using mass transit, but decide to use it anyways because it is their preferred mode of transportation. I wanted to interview these riders because I sought to understand why people used mass transit besides pure necessity. It’s not hard to guess that Miami isn’t a city with a lot of choice riders. Miami was recently ranked #6 in U.S. cities with the worst traffic.

I conducted 5 interviews with Miami residents to gather insights into why they did or didn’t use public transportation. Their responses were really helpful in drafting my user personas, but the interviews didn’t give me all the information I was looking for. I started to turn towards existing research.

A study conducted by graduate student Andre Carrel from Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering found that the factors most important to passengers of mass transit concerned the reliability of service. The study sought to learn not only how transit users try and adapt to the unreliability of buses and trains, but also how their experiences informed their long-term opinions of public transportation.

The responses I collected from my survey, interviews, and the research data from the Berkeley study determined the main areas I needed to focus on: convenience, timeliness, and location.

I heard many of the same frustrations over and over again: people don’t want to be late to work because of delays, people don’t think the Metrorail goes anywhere they need to go, and people don’t want to be stuck waiting at their origin station for an indefinite amount of time. They generally don’t see the value or convenience in using public transportation when they can just drive.

IDEATING POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

From here, I did some brainstorming and went through a few ideation exercises to draft some possible solutions. If the main pain points concerned convenience, timeliness, and location, what features might help alleviate those frustrations? My design required:

I asked around to see what apps and websites people enjoyed using most to get around. Waze has become increasingly popular. It’s a company I admire a lot for catering to the needs of their users in ways that other apps don’t. Their “Planned Drive” feature stood out as a possible solution since time constraints were a major pain point that drove users away from the unreliability associated with public transportation.

Waze’s Planned Drive feature

VISUAL DESIGN + USER TESTING

For my visual design, I drew inspiration from iconic Miami imagery and classic transit style guidelines. My final prototype strayed far from my initial vision of an Art Deco inspired web design. I had to re-focus and remind myself that I was working on a government website. Users responded better to more conventional and conservative color schemes during AB testing.

My initial moodboard

My style guide changed significantly throughout the process and finding the right shade of green that people responded to positively was harder than I thought. I tried to stay close to the Miami-Dade color scheme, but my users quickly shut this down during AB Testing when I was told by several people that my green reminded them of Publix.

I was shooting for Miami-Dade, but my users were getting Publix
My final style guide

TAKEAWAYS + FINAL PROTOTYPE

Although I originally wanted to focus on a website re-design, I now realize that many of these pain points would be more efficiently solved through a mobile application. The Miami-Dade Transit app needs work too. Maybe that could be my next project.

Watch a walkthrough of my proposed redesign below:

Rebecca Grant

Written by

UX/UI Designer / www.rebeccagrant.co

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