UX Case Study: Reimagining the PTV app for Public Transport of Victoria

The Challenge

The current PTV app is feature rich but the information is hidden behind challenging UI. How do we unlock this information and present it in a more human centred way? How can we include walking and cycling promotion and ticketing purchase?

The brief

• How can we better support multi-modal travel?
• Promote a shift to walking and cycling?
• Promote better ticketing and purchase?

My Role

I had a large contribution to the ideation including the community aspect, I created the prototype and kept the project on track creating daily project targets.

Design Vision

During our first round of interviews, we tested an assumption that the current app was dense and somewhat impenetrable for some users. To that end I devised a design motto that would help keep us on track which we could
also test. The new app had to be:

Simple, intuitive and friendly

All features and the final product were tested against this.

The beginning of the Affinity Map

Process

Competitor Analysis

We had a long list of competitors to look at including the apps within their own suite like the popular Tramtracker. Also included were Waze to look at the potential community aspect, Yes Optus for their clear presentation of credits and usage, and Deliveroo and Uber for their mapping.

Topic Mapping

The topics were split into three areas, transport, cycling and walking, and ticketing. This way we could get clear focused questions around each facet
of the brief.

User Research

We first read our interview findings to each other to get a sense of
how each of our subjects were feeling about public transport and using transport apps.

We transcribed the findings on to Post-its to create an Affinity Map. These were then sorted into modes. For example train, tram, bike walk, MYKI and PTV app experience.

Affinity Mapping

These were then reorganised into similar experiences with each mode from positive to negative.

This helped us to focus on the pain points.

Personas

• To create our first draft we found it easier if one person took control and became our story teller.
• They scanned the edited affinity map and pulled together similar themes.
• The persona stories were recorded into a first draft.
• As we revised each draft, we saw where there were similarities and combined similar stories so that we built more robust personas. We made sure that we created a regular, occasional and new user.

Ideation

We created three criteria to make sure we had the brief forefront and placed our ideas under each list:

• Travel planning
• Promote walking and cycling
• Better promotion of ticket information and purchasing
• After closer inspection we realized that there were a combination of features and concepts. We then reorganized our chart into two.

Community concept / Avatar creation

With the community concept we were able to answer a lot of our users
concerns i.e:

• Safety and alerts
• Live updates

These help the user save time. We were also able to answer our own vision
of making the experience more friendly and to include a reward system for walking and riding.

I looked at ways in which we could leverage the existing Dumb Ways to Die characters. This seemed a logical choice considering their popularity and great brand recognition.

This would all be opt-in as a way to add fun to the app but not at the expense of users that just want the functionality.

After a lot of discussion we narrowed down what we thought were the features that answered the brief and where they crossed over with our personas.

We agreed that the app must be “light” with only the features that would make it a minimal viable product.

We then proceeded to sketch and discuss how we would like the app to: 1. function, 2. interact with a mobile interface, and 3. look.

Usability Testing

After robust discussion we discovered that our initial designs for the home page and journey planner was a digital experience and could not be explained adequately with a paper prototype.

Most of our interactions required mobile actions so we needed to move to digital.

Our main iterations were around:

• Action language
• Prompt to enter destination
• The GO button changed 3 times then back to GO with an arrow
• The clickable items
• Initial map zoom
• Adding a timetable
• Actual transport icons
• Colouring icon to indicate crowding

Prototyping

Click here for the Prototype

Project 3 PTV

Next Steps

In the second release we would suggest:

• An AR guiding feature is developed to aid in any walking or biking situations. Most likely for navigating around large stations or walking to the nearest stop.
• We would improve the machine learning so the app learns your actions and preferences better. There would then be more contextual messaging from the avatar in the bottom left corner. For example, when the app knows that you have gone for a ride on your bike, the avatar might say “Nearly there! 5 more KM and you will unlock the roller blades”.
• Nintendo DS style communication with other users where your avatar can jump from phone to phone and communicate with other users when you pass another community member.

Conclusion

As a team we were lucky enough to be on the same page when it came to the visual representation of our product. We wanted it to be simple, intuitive and fun.

The community aspect of the app was also able to answer our internal brief by creating a way to reward passengers for riding and walking and using it as a platform to update travel information.

By simplifying the interface and making it more logical, we were able to make it more engaging and something that people want to use.