Keep Melbourne Moving through Public Transport Victoria — a User Experience Design (Mock) Challenge
Melbourne has been deemed “the most liveable city in the world” for seven years in a row and with this achievement comes unique challenges (The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Liveability Index). With population growth, road congestion, petrol price rises and greater environmental awareness, these factors have contributed to an increasing number of Melbournians making the shift to public transport.
Public Transport Victoria (PTV) currently have many projects on the way such as more trains, more train lines, and lots of upgrades (more electrification, duplication) but there’s still a missing link…
We accept your challenge!
As a team of four designers, we were tasked to complete the following mock brief under nine (working) days:
- Better multi-modal travel support through the PTV mobile application
- Promote a shift to walking and cycling (in collaboration with Melbourne Bike Share)
- Better promote ticketing information and purchase
A quick break-down of our design process:
- Background Research — desktop research on PTV and competition, mind mapping topics
- Human Contact — discussion guide, user interviews, contextual inquiry
- Research Analysis — affinity map, key insights, personas, feature brainstorming, feature prioritisation (dot voting, feature matrix, clustering), customer flow and touch points
- On Paper — brain storming initial sketches, wireframes, paper prototyping and testing
- Test and Iterate — usability testing on InVision app, Sketch revisions, test again, repeat
What’s going on in the world?
Looking outside and seeing where lessons can be gained, we started off our desktop research first understanding who and what PTV are. Then, we looked at the world to see what has been implemented successfully and with positive response from the public.
Amongst the many mobile applications that cater to public transport systems in their origin cities, we found that the best benchmark to study was Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is one of the planet’s most densely populated cities and rises elegantly to the challenge of providing an efficient transport system with offline and online complements (Arcadis Sustainable Cities Mobility Index 2017). The public transport system, the mobile application and payment card are intertwined robustly as evident in real-time updates and the efficient flow of trains and people.
Other places and people we considered in our study included Denmark, Italy, London, Tokyo, Korea, Singapore, Germany and New York.
- Denmark has introduced the “S-Train”, which have bike compartments with one-way traffic to make it easier to get on and off. 91% of users from their own analysis expressed their love of this integrated service.
- Italy have trams that allow up to 6 bicycles to be transported with passengers.
- A London organisation are slowly empowering vision-impaired individuals to navigate through indoor spaces, with their first test location being in Pimlico Station.
Reading through elegantly implemented technology and current systems has given us inspiration and direction for our over-all outcome. It was hard not to get overly excited with the potential outcomes, but bringing it back to the user research and insights kept the team, most times, on the same mind.
Let’s get talking
The team split up to do our interviews and all together collated 15 interviews across a range of demographics to attempt to capture a rich understanding of the problem and frustrations.
Our affinity map revealed an array of trends and insights so we narrowed it down to the following five:
Hidden Features
Majority of users talk about how they primarily use the PTV app as a journey planner but bounce between GoogleMap and other applications to compensate for the features they did not realise existed on the current PTV app.
Where is Myki?
Frustrations with the disconnect between PTV and Myki is evident. Users talk about the card being a hindrance, touch-on/touch-off process can be confusing and a over-all negative impression due to this.
Higher Expectance out of Technology
The functionality and features of today’s mobile applications come with a certain level of expectation as users gain learned behaviours from a variety of technology.
Lack of trust and reliability
From the compound effect of all things mentioned above, users clearly stated that they don’t see the PTV app as their first point of contact for information. According to our interviewees, data and delays are not consistently updated and have to be personally resolved by visiting the website, looking through the official Twitter feed and word-of-mouth. This led to an over-all negative experience with PTV app and the system.
Bonus: Avoiding public transport due to safety reasons (primarily from female interviewees)
We heard personal stories of women of different ages expressing measures taken to ensure their own safety — one sharing how she would choose to rent a room in the city versus taking the train home at 9 o’clock in the evening.
Problem statement
There is a distrust in the PTV system due to inconsistencies in the lack of reliable, timely information and communication through mobile platform.
Solution statement
We believe we can regain trust with the public by enhancing the current system to support PTV as a whole and Myki services. This is to cater to the changing digital environment and public needs.
What would Lauren think and feel?
Meet Lauren, our primary persona.
From the rich data we collated together as a group, we were able to identify five different personas that encapsulated the groups who would potentially use the PTV app.
Through Lauren, we wanted to paint out her journey and identify touch points — moments of interaction with the mobile application. The story we drew out was of Lauren making her way to her university, catching up with friends at the pub, then going home. Interactions we noted include checking for delays and journey planning with trains, trams, and even bike share. To give Lauren reassurance for a safe travel home, we also brainstormed safety features to incorporate into the application.
This was a great tool to use to be able to keep the team on the same page on priorities and interactions involved so the user flow we developed for our prototype flowed as smooth as possible.
Think far, focus now
Looking at our pain points and brainstorming, we prioritised features on an axis with two main factors — impact and complexity. We aimed to work on features that had the highest impact and lowest complexity. This helped us to narrowed it down to these priorities:
Clean up general mobile application design and integrate GoogleMaps API and language
GoogleMaps has been a strong reference for journey planning amongst users, so we wanted to keep this familiar written and visual language as similar as possible.
Integration of Myki within PTV app
Most especially for this brief, this was a logical move as users verbalised frustrations and negative interactions.
Incentivising Walking/Cycling
I have to admit that I initially was under the impression that people would want the best for their health, but I was proven wrong. Many users during our interviews admitted to not being driven by health gains in their journey planning but rather were driven by efficiency and duration of the route.
What was the best way to make people want to walk and cycle then? We found that common ways other competitors have used to solve this is through a points-and-rewards system.
Safety - Capacity and ‘Busy-ness’ indicator
Solving two problems under one, the train-capacity and carriage-capacity indicator work hand-in-hand to give a quick visual reference. In a rush, Lauren can get a glance of the indicator to know which train and carriage to jump into. During late nights, Lauren, most especially when she is feeling unsafe, can check these indicators to pick-out carriages to ride with a moderate amount of people around her.
Let’s get down to sketching and testing
From sketches, wireframes and several iterations from user feedbacks, these are the frames we developed at the time of delivery.
Where to from here?
Through more testing and iterations, the mobile application can be tested within the public for further feedback and growth.
Starting off with the general user interface clean up to bring forward existing PTV features, we would then be able to incorporate the recommended journey planner to encourage multi-modal travel together with walking and cycling. Using the strengths of Melbourne Bike Share into the PTV app would further support this move too.
Integrating Myki into the PTV app to provide ticketing information and then the ability to top-up on this platform can lead the way to build behaviour (and technology) to use our phones to touch-on-touch-off on our PTV journeys.
Releasing updates in segments (starting from the basis of UI clean-up to the capacity indicator) would lead to a smooth transition for current users to familiarise themselves with changes and slowly use the PTV app as a source of reliable and timely information.
Our future suggestions included revisiting the competition analysis on implementing existing technology into our current public transport system. This would help in making the capacity indicator accurate, integrating bicycles into the public system and way-finding through audio for vision-impaired and eventually for the public.
Personal Reflections
My roles in this project was as a facilitator, researcher, wireframe builder and presenter.
I specifically contributed to: initiating collaboration through Milanote and Google Drive, research on international transport, 3 interviews and contextual inquiries, collaboration with affinity mapping and analysis, sketching and wireframes on Sketch, interactive prototype on InVision, and the introduction phase of the presentation.
The design sprint was a good challenge due to the time constraints and the scope of the brief. From what seemed like a simple mobile application redesign, it morphed itself into an over-all system overview to be completed in less than two weeks.
In future, I would like to have been able to review the financial impact and bearings of each features. By doing so, I would think it would be helpful to push forward our findings in a language that stakeholders may better understand and grasp. This is a skill I can gain through more practice and experience, as business talk is a language I am slowly getting accustomed to.
Main Personal Insight
Lots of learning. Lots of growth. Lots of fun. Many more to come. :)
A Little Bit about Me
I am a Melbourne-based User Experience Designer. Nurse and start-up founder in a parallel life. Naturally curious, inquisitive and empathetic towards things old and new. Learn more about me here.
