R.O.T.A.
Royal Oak Transit App
Prompt: Design Project for Social Good
Design an app and a responsive website that help parents and students find bus routes and stop information. The app should also let parents and students search for or create their own carpooling groups.
I was given this prompt using a prompt generator which also gave me instructions for styling that will be discussed later on. Below is a description of my process for approaching this project.
Research:
Starting off, I always like to do research because it helps me establish goals on what needs we’re actually trying to address.
My initial questions was, “would an app like this actaully be useful?” Thinking back to my time in school, bus routes were usually offered to parents after a quick phone call or office visit. And this isn’t something subject to change regularly. Would they really want or need an app dedicated to this opposed to checking once on a website?
Since this is a hypothetical case, there’d be no direct answer to this. To complete the project I continued to include this feature, but time and effort were dedicated to the carpooling aspect which would be much more involved and probably used more regularly.
Further questions addressed:
How would we go about validating students?
Should students be able to sign up for the school bus via the app or with they still have to go to office?
How would we validate and verify drivers?
How will we make parents and students comfortable with this verification process?
Ideation:
While the app should have functionality to be used across devices, we went with a mobile-first approach and startied with wireframing for Android screens. I wanted the app to be very simplified and easy to use in a hurry for students who would possible already be running late. We also wanted drivers who were already preoccupied to be able to quickly respond.
While conducting interviews and creating the personas, I wanted to make sure we included perspectives of both students AND parents.
Because of this, I made sure to create user journey maps that reflected these perspectives.
Creating a timeline was helpful. But I definitely put in some hours over the weekend. In a group-environment it would also be helpful to get more feedback.
Wireframing:
Aside from the visual suggestions from the prompt we used, we wanted the app to be very simplified and easy to use in a hurry for students who would possible already be running late. We also wanted drivers who were already preoccupied to be able to quickly respond.
Based on our initial research, I thought a rider AND driver view would be necessary
Prototyping:
Aside from the visual suggestions from the prompt we used, we wanted the app to be very simplified and easy to use in a hurry for students who would possible already be running late. We also wanted drivers who were already preoccupied to be able to quickly respond.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Refining
Starting off, what we tried to do was see what the needs were and if this app is something that would be in-demand.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Moving forward
Issues I faced:
Recruiting children for users studies is a difficult.
I relied on opions from friends/family and their siblings a lot more for this project that I intended. For a real project, I assume it would be easier since we’d already have connections to a school that has shown interest and we’d be able to sort out things like waivers and get consent from parents to interview students.
Final decisions will have to be made by the office.
Most user journeys will end in either the students or drivers having to contact the school’s office to complete school bus registration or driver verification. Initially, we tried to find ways to complete many of these steps within the app, but this would require there to be a 3rd branch of the app used by administrators that they would have to regularly monitor. To save time and resources, it makes more sense to defer all final decisions back to the school’s administration since they already have systems in place.
