Contextual Inquiry
We observed frequent and new OneBusAway users to see how they used the mobile application. There was a common confusion among new users regarding the capabilities of OBA. Most new users were expecting a trip planning feature to help tell them what route/stop they should take. Overall, the majority of users thought alerts would be a beneficial improvement to OBA (CI user sample happened to consist of only iOS users).
Value Sensitive Design
With a focus on alerts & notifications, we assessed the values behind OneBusAway as well as the harms and benefits that a real-time notification system would present.
Task Analysis and Design Sketches
We looked carefully at our tasks to make sure we had a representative set of procedures to test our alert system, and conceptualized mobile as well as web-based interfaces to achieve our tasks.
Video Prototype
Our video prototype depicts three scenarios surrounding our three representative tasks.
Low-Fidelity Prototype & User Testing
Up until this stage in our design process, our group was focused solely on alerts and the expert/frequent users that would most benefit from them. Unfortunately, it was brought to our attention that alerts were already implemented into iOS as well as other mobile platforms. With this news, we looked back at our Contextual Inquiry and took into account the difficulty that new users found with OBA, as well as the fact that even our experienced CI users had no clue that alerts were implemented. We decided to broaden our user audience and implemented trip planning to accomodate new users. We also looked at how "hidden" features of OBA could be redesigned to become more prominent.
Interactive Prototype
Our entire design process is reflected in our interactive prototype. Here, many of the issues that we wanted to tackle to improve OBA are presented. Try our prototype!