CU Shuttle
Project Length
Teammates
Deliverables
Tools
Challenge ⛰️
Status quo: app that is difficult to access through the Columbia Transportation website and unreliable bus location
Our team tackled a design challenge around designing a new solution for Columbia University's shuttle bus experience. challenge to improve the flow of information between Columbia Transportation and the broader campus community. We focused on creating an easy-to-use platform for new and frequent riders.
Currently, students have to rely on old-school timetables as well as an app that does not accurately showcase the buses location. Our analysis of the current systems in use showed us that it's difficult to determine which street corners are bus stops, and especially difficult to do on mobile phone as the schedules and maps are listed as PDF's on Columbia Transportation's website.
Current systems in use: third party apps and PDF schedules
We focused on creating an easy-to-use platform for new and frequent riders.
Research 🔍
Competitor Analysis
We looked at some direct competitors to the current system in place.
Other transportation apps Columbia students use
Ride Planning services, such as:
- MTA Bus Time
- Ridesharing Apps
Considering Offline options that lead to user churn
We kept in mind that students may resort to other options such as:
- Walking
- Biking
What do other schools do?
We talked to students at other schools such as Cornell and NYU to hear more about their shuttle systems, and identify aspects we could learn from, as well as similar difficulties they encountered.
User Interviews & Questionnaires
We gathered:
→ 30 Questionnaire Responses from Students
→ 15 User Interviews with CU Affiliates
→ 2 Expert Interviews with Columbia Transportation
And found:
→ 50% of responders rate the current app experience as “very bad”
→ Almost 35% had never used the shuttle bus
→ Routing, location tracking & bus stops were difficult to understand
Based on these insights, we were wondering:
“How might we create a streamlined process between the information and features available on the transportation website and app to simplify the shuttle system?”
Synthesis 📋
Personas
Based on the users we interviewed, we created personas that helped us better empathize with the users we build our new app for.
View our Journey Map and Stakeholder Map here
Key Insights and Opportunity Areas
Key Problems in User Journey
- Low app usage
- Inconsistency in Routes
- Delays and Inaccurate Tracking
- Unintuitive Schedule
- No Alerts & Notifications
Opportunity Areas
- Guide New Users
- Make Routes Understandable
- Make User's next step unambiguous
- Streamline Experience
Ideation 💡
Going broad before narrowing down
From our research we knew that:
Users value transparency, accuracy, and flexibility when using a transportation method. They expect an all-in-one service that optimizes their travels by providing personalized trip planning.
Because we wanted to possibly come up with a completely new solution and not close ourselves off to mobile apps, we completed a crazy 8 exercises where we went as broad as possible for solutions (blue skies). Some of these ideas were completely analog, but still gave us a better understanding of what our user experience needs to cover (e.g. digital assistance when questions come up while booking the trip).
A pivot
Columbia officially outsourced their night shuttle operations to an on-demand ride-share service. As a result, we based our solution sketches on key quotes from our user interviews. With the night shuttle out of the way, many user problems had already been solved. We then focussed on the remaining bus lines.
We continued with solution sketches that turned into refined wireframes...
Prototyping 🏗
Prototyping the CU Shuttle mobile app
We proceeded with a mobile app, because our experts and users showed the need of having a portable solution where they could look up their Columbia shuttle bus route in a way that's meaningful to them, as a simple google maps integration did not work in the past.
We create user stories based on our insights to decide the information architecture of our app and which features solve which user needs specifically. Here, we chose to not design for on the staff/bus driver at this point, but it would be a useful expansion in the future.
Mid-Fi Prototype
Next- we created a Mid-Fidelity prototype that we were planning to test our idea with.
Testing 🧪
Testing CU Shuttle with task scenarios
To test our app, 4 Users were given the tasks to…
- "Take Columbia's Intercampus ShuttleBus to Studebaker South to attend work in the morning. You are an intern for Columbia’s Student Financial Services department, which is located in the Studebaker building."
- "Use the CU Shuttle Bus App to find information about how to get to your destination."
While users completed these tasks, we observed them as they navigated the app and asked them to elaborate any pain points further. For each user story, we created and color coded a task map.
View full results with task map here
Takeaways from testing: reduce ambiguity
Based on our insights we received, we identified the following improvement areas and action items that we considered during the creation of our High-Fi prototype.
- Indicate the direction of bus lines
- Add icons to bus map that are easy to understand
- Explain the color of the bus lines
- Clarify ETA in app
- Find a intuitive place for service change alerts
- Fix misleading wording, such as “miles away”
- Communicate bus capacity
- Make it possible to contact CU Transportation
Iteration/Results 🤸
The final CU Shuttle App
The final CU Shuttle app allows users to:
- Plan their trip from their current location: users are automatically assigned the closest bus stop
- The user can prepare their trips in advance, access bus schedules, see all stops in order and is updated on the bus capacity
- Ambiguity about when the next bus will arrive and possible delays is removed by a new update/notification center on the main screen and schedule delay indicator
- Trip planner allows users to save frequent trips
- Chat function to reduce user churn if there are open questions
We are in the talks to implement the app with CU Transportation. After completing the app, we identified some additional hardware challenges with GPS on the buses, that we hope to tackle in the future to optimize the app further.
