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Transit-19

Jan 2020 · 5 min read
Tara Sethi | Collaborators: Laura Davies, Prithvi Kudva
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Reducing commuting stress for essential workers

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global decline in the use of public transit. As a result, many cities have made widespread service cuts. However, these service cuts place significant stress on essential workers who still need to commute to work. Low-income essential workers, in particular, are still in dire need of improved transit efforts.

This team project was completed to satisfy the requirements for the Emerging Interfaces (HF765) course at Bentley University. All work shown was the result of a collaborative effort.

 

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THE CHALLENGE

Prioritizing essential workers

Essential workers face crowding on public transport due to the reduction in service, leaving them at high risk of contracting the virus. In addition, essential workers often have inflexible and varying shift schedules that make planning difficult. These factors, along with the many other challenges low-income populations face, create a strong physiological and emotional burden. Ultimately, our challenge is to make mass transit safe, reliable, and easy for essential workers.

USER RESEARCH

Insights from secondary research

Through careful analysis of periodicals, peer-reviewed articles, transit reports, and existing solutions, we formed a better understanding of the key pain points for essential workers. We also learned how new technologies could be leveraged to help solve our challenge. 

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BRAINSTORMING

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Abstracting out

In our initial brainstorming, we focused on gathering as many ideas as possible--no matter how abstract. These ideas helped influence our more practical ideas later on.

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Our ideas went as broad as redesigning cities and towns to as narrow as developing self-cleaning surfaces. After evaluating several abstractions, we landed on our solution.

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Sketches inspired by the concept of a "touch-less world"

The initial administrator design

SOLUTION

SafeRoute application

SafeRoute is an application that helps reduce daily commuting stress for users. SafeRoute runs as a mobile application for riders and as a SaaS web application for administrators.

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UI Design

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EVALUATION CRITERIA

Stress indicators and rider metrics

The design will be successful if the application reduces stress for essential workers. This can be measured through self-reported user evaluations. However, the success of the product is dependent on employer buy-in and the widespread use of riders.

NEXT STEPS

Usability testing

Next, a functional prototype should be deployed for usability testing with essential workers as participants. If the design proves to be desirable, non-essential workers should also undergo usability testing to ensure the application would prove valuable in both pandemic and non-pandemic times.

PROJECT DATE

August 2020 - December 2020

MY ROLE

One of three collaborators on the Transit-19 project. Sketches, annotations, and graphics shown were created individually.

TOOLS

Miro, Figma, WCAG Accessibility Guidelines

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