M.
Travease
Mobile Application
What is Travease
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A Chennai city travel mobile app that intelligently prepares a travel itinerary for the user and helps him commute seamlessly to his destination.
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Key Goal
Travease was a student project that was done during my 3 month experience design course at UXMint and the need was to pick a problem statement and implement the entire UX process.
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My Roles + Responsibilities
We did research and analysis (personas, journey maps) and experience design (sketching, wireframes and prototyping)​
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Timeline & Team
Projected was completed in 5 months and was a combined team of 4 members, all of us new to UX concepts
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Tools
Adobe XD, Affinity Designer, Invision, Canvasflip, Realtime board
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Year
2017
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Link
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Problem Statement
Chennai city has an excellent range of transport system and extremely well connected buses, local trains and metros. However, Chennai’s buses and trains can be highly unpredictable making it hard to plan one’s everyday journey.
We decided to build a solution that enables commuters to plan their journeys efficiently.
Before going forward with the User Research, we did some background research to understand Chennai's existing transport facilities.
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Bus Transport - Chennai's bus service, currently, plies about 4,000 buses on 622 routes, moves an estimated 5.038 million passengers each day.
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Local trains - The Chennai suburban railway system currently has 6 lines with a total system length of about 896.5 km (557 mi) (non-redundant track length) of which 286 km (178 mi) are true suburban and 610.5 km (379 mi).
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Metro trains - Totally 7 corridors, connecting major hubs within the cities. Currently a popular mode of transport among office commuters.
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Autos - Unmetered autos ply across the city charging flat rates. Economical alternative to the auto rickshaws are the share autos, in which passengers pay a shared fee to their destination. In 2012, according to estimates, 66,679 auto rickshaws and over 2,000 share autos were running in the city.
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Taxis and private vehicles - Chennai has a high density of two wheelers and four vehicles owing to heavy traffic condition and resulting in an average commutation speed of 18 k/hr.
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Users & Audience
I conducted detailed background research, gathered data on existing modes of travel, interviews and studies with daily commuters in order to understand their requirements, challenges and also discover design opportunities.
42
Total interviews
User Groups
4
THE LUXURY SEEKER
Finance Manager | 35 yrs
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Reduce traveling time
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Smarter pay options
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Air conditioned services
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Proper bus schedules
THE SLOTH
College student | 20 yrs
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Help me plan my travel
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Avoid crowds
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Can’t wait too long at stops
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Special services for schools /colleges
THE ANALYZER
Software Engineer | 27 yrs
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Clear schedule for buses & trains
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Quicker access to stops
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Easier ticketing methods
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Better connectivity
THE PLANNER
Personal Driver | 43 yrs
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Convenient for family to travel
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Easily transfer between different modes
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Reduce walking between modes
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Shouldn’t worry about safety
Here is a detailed user persona for the The Planner, one of our user groups. The persona explores his goals, pain points, needs and his motivations.
We also documented The Planner’s journey map to identify the design opportunities. We tried to map The Planner's emotions, thoughts and contextual pain points based on the instances collected through the research.
After analyzing the personas and all the user data , we could summarize on the major user needs. This gave us a direction to get started with the design process.
Design
Following the analysis, we used the divergence and convergence technique to build the concepts and define the features that could solve the user’s pain points.
The following are the digital features/concepts for the mobile application we built.
Mobile Application Features
Cashless travel - A single ticket for the entire journey, with support for multiple mode of transport
Behavior based transport choice
Intelligent route suggestions
Flexible route saving preference for users’ regular travel
Live tracking and direction tracking
Alarm system to help user pre-plan journey
Dedicated car and bike pooling option
Rewards/ points to encourage public transport and pooling
We learnt that the buses and local trains are the most widely used and preferred mode of transport since it’s cost effective and well connected.
We wanted to empower the commuters of the app with physical features that can compliment the digital ones.
Physical Features
GPS tracking to provide realtime location and time information
Intelligent route suggestion
Harness the Share Auto service concept in Chennai to act as shuttles where buses/trains aren’t accessible
Special QR and Smart Card device for bus conductors
Enable recharging with conductors when insufficient balance in card
Special school and college bus services during peak hours
Seamless transport smart card for all modes for non-mobile users or non-smartphone users
Conductor guidance system - A simple tool with color codes to let the driver know how fast/slow he should drive to avoid bus bunching
Some suggestive features include :
A dedicated bus lane to maintain schedules
Closed shelter bus stops to tolerate Chennai’s heat
A display board and voice over announcements for timings and schedules
Installing CCTV cameras for commuter safety
Information Architecture
After finalizing all the features , we built the information architecture for the mobile application. We used the card sorting technique and the Eisenhower Matrix to design the hierarchy of the application.
Wireframing & Taskflows
We proceeded to build the wireframes by defining the task flows. We held rapid prototyping sessions followed by that performed 4-5 iterations of every screen.
We created high-fidelity wireframes and prototype for all the user task flows and features in our mobile application. During the process, we realized that a lot of concepts needed to be fine-tuned and re-iterated so that it’s truly functional.
User Testing
We used CanvasFlip and performed 3 rounds of testing to understand how our users interacted with it and iterated and fixed our wireframes.
What I Learnt
This was my first UX project ever and there was a huge learning curve but as a student, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process. The project is also featured in the UXMint website.
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The entire UX process was quite overwhelming for a newbie like me just getting into design.
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We made several mistakes along the way , where we had to go back and fix the gaps in the data . The several iterations over the concept and wireframes helped hugely overcome the fear of failure and the tendency to perfect things from the start.
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I also wished that we had focused a little more on the business model for the government and the benefit for users.