How are you getting to work today? There’s an app for that.
For many of us urban commuters, weekday mornings present a choice: how will we get to work today - walk, bike, bus or drive? For those of us with regular office hours, what dictates our choice of commute mode is not what time we have to be at work in the morning as much as what the weather looks like like on our morning - and evening - commute.
The weather, of course, can be fickle. Sometimes we’ll leave home in morning sun, but have to battle rain on our return commute. While walking or riding to work made sense at 7:30 AM, a weather system might roll in and make a 5:00 PM bicycle commute unpleasant.
To help sort out which mode of transportation makes the most sense each day, I created Commute Chooser, an app that recommends whether to walk, ride, take the bus (or train) or drive each day. It makes these recommendations basted your preferences. If you’re not into cycling, or you don’t own a car, you can uncheck those commute modes. If you like walking to work, but only when it’s warm out, the app will take that into account.
I started out by observing people as they walked me through the ways they used their devices every morning. While subjects varied in the depth and type of information they wanted every morning, they all wanted to know what the weather would be like before leaving. And most had options for what kind of commute modes they could
I created storyboards based on what I observed.To get a feel for what apps already exist, and what users liked (and didn’t) I looked at dashboard-style apps that subjects used (and didn’t). These included the Fitbit interface, One Bus Away, Google Maps, and weather apps.
User testing of paper prototypes helped me to realize commute mode choice is relative; feelings about what weather conditions one will tolerate for one’s commute depend entirely on what options are available. I might be more willing to tolerate a rainy walk to work if I don’t own a car, but not if a bus commute is available.
I also observed that app users can get impatient with adding their preferences if there are too many options.
When it was time to create an online prototype, I put all the commute option sliders all on one page. I A/B tested the preferences all on one page (as with the sliders below) and a deign more similar to the original paper prototype. The relative sliders were a hit!
Based on the A/B tester feedback, and on in-person thoughts, I made some final tweaks. You can try out the final prototype for yourself here. Let me know what you think!