Congestion Information — Yahoo! JAPAN Transit

My Role: User Research, UI/UX, PR, WEB DESIGN

Yahoo! JAPAN Transit helps 27 million users to get around Tokyo subway. Transit team’s mission is to provide the most accurate, comprehensive, and useful route for users.

Why Visualize Congestion?

Yahoo! Transit has always been a place for people to search the route on the go. However, there were times users could not go along with the suggested route the train is overloaded with people. Our team was really fascinated to solve this problem using 27 million user’s data to predict future extreme congestion.

My Role and my design Process

As the lead designer, I was responsible for the design process from user hearing, creating wireframes, building user interface mockups and prototypes and designing promotion page.

First we collected 100+ online surveys to find out the pain point of daily commute. We found out that many users were frustrated to encounter extreme congestion at times like summer festival, sports games, and concerts.

To see users reaction towards visualizing congestion data, we created several web page to showcase our big data report. We received many positive feedbacks from the users.

Then we conducted 10+ user hearing to find out what are the information users are looking for in particular.

We found out that users wish to know

• The exact peak of congestion ( “Is it 6:45pm? or 6:50pm?” )
• Which station gets congested ( “I ride from XX station. Does it get crowded from there or from the station after?”)
• Why it is congested ( “Will it get crowded every week or just today…? And why?” )
• Is there a way to go around the congested route?

From then on I created several wireframes and communicated with engineers to figure the possible ways to visualize congestions.

User Interface

Here is the final user interface.

Page on the right shows the route to the destination. When congestion is detected that route becomes highlighted in orange. The human icon show the congestion level.

Users who wish to see the details can tap the orange area. I designed the entire page. It shows the future 5 days congestion level by 10 mins. It tells the station which is congested and the reason why it may be congested. The red button on the top right corner is to navigate the less crowded route.

ACHIEVEMENT

This new feature was introduced in Yahoo! JAPAN’s official press release, which was then introduced in multiple well-known media in TOKYO such as ITmedia, Gizmodo, etc.