Mobile - Transportation
New Product Design
Los Angeles, California
Overview:
Commuter transportation in Los Angeles, California (LA) is difficult, as well as in other major cities. Too many times bus drivers are faced with unexpected delays that end up snowballing and are hard for drivers to regain time back and recover from. These delays end up ruining the bus schedule, commuter plans, and in the end cause even greater disruptions in traffic and dissatisfaction.
Our Users:
Our original target users were bus drivers within LA's transit authority. Researchers talked with, sat with, and rode buses at all hours within LA's complex routes. Eventually, the user base grew after some time, it now encompasses all commuters within LA.
Our Task: The need was to make sense of traffic delays and be able to alert bus drivers en route that a delay was coming up, with enough advanced notice to enable the bus to be able to re-route and get back on track to regain their time.
A large and extended research team aggregated the qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with bus drivers, passengers, staff and found that we were not able to solve the task of being able to get the bus back on track in enough time to not delay the commute. But if we had a larger user base and opened up the system to work with the department of transportation's user base, the bus rider, we could alert commuters to the delay and enable them to choose a different stop on the new route it would save everyone time.
The Work: