Unibus.
Universal university transportation
Designing a digital transportation aid to help universities run a more sustainable public transit system on campus.
Unibus.
MOBILE UX DESIGN FOR CLIENT
Access to good transportation is a must in this day and age, as cities are developing and our built world becomes larger. College students are not exempt from this statement — not only do they have to learn to acclimate to a new, independent setting, but also start doing the essentials alone — getting to class, getting home safely at night, grocery shopping, and many more use cases.
Unibus is a universal university bus app solution for a quick and easy way to get to a destination, with features to save frequently visited stops, request safe personal rides at night, an ability to connect with the team, and a smart way to set reminders for when to leave a building and begin their trek to the bus stop.
TIMELINE
PROCESS SUMMARY
Lead UX Designer — Amy Zhang
Bus Stop Designer — Edward Liew
Research — Amy Zhang + Edward Liew
This is a group project that is intended to produce a final sustainability / accessbility proposal for a client, Richard Johnson, the head of sustainability at Rice University. I ideated, researched, and designed the application using Figma and Adobe Illustrator.
The project began in January of 2022 and was wrapped up in April of 2022.
Rice University is looking to revamp their transportation system and improve on general sustainability across campus. My partner Edward Liew and I joined the Case Studies in Sustainability program, where we had the opportunity to make a project proposal to the head of sustainability. We presented our project to the head of transportation and the app is being considered for implementation in the future. Our transportation app and bus stop redesigns will be completed at the end of April of 2022, and are meant to be used as a versatile set of designs to be reproduced across the country.
Find your routes.
Make Unibus your own.
SCOPING THE PROJECT
For the Case Studies in Sustainability program, we had an opportunity to investigate ways to improve sustainability and accessibility at Rice University.
As a frequent user of the Rice University shuttles and its corresponding tracking app over the years, I had noticed some improvements that could be made to the user interfaces, the routes, and the transportation system surrounding Rice in general. Students, faculty, and staff at Rice University all need a way to get to campus, get around campus, and get home from campus.
How do we make a transportation system accessible, sustainable, and easy to to use?
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INITIAL USER RESEARCH
Identifying the Audience
The current users of the Rice University transportation app and system are the faculty, staff, and students. The primary target group for the mobile app is on- and off-campus students, as they tend to live within a bussing range of the university. The goal of this system redesign is to address the needs of this user group.
Walk or ride?
By using Google Maps estimates averaged with in-person survey results, I compiled some data regarding the types of sustainable transport that students tend to use to get to, from, and around campus. According to my data, using the Rice shuttle was the second fastest way to get to campus, just after biking.
The existing process
The current Rice University bus app is called RideSystems, a simple, mostly functional transit app developed by Rice's internal team of developers. To get a better sense of all the functions and the possible improvements, I analyzed RideSystems and noted positives and negatives in the current design.
What are the pain points?
To understand my user's pain points with the current Rice University transit app, I conducted 6 direct interviews with student users and supplemented these findings with a focus group with 4 additional students. From here, I generated a list of the answers from different individuals and translated them into an affinity board associated with specific redesign features.
EMMA
FOSTER
"As someone who cares about sustainability, I want to feel incentivized to use public transport. However, the current system still encourages me to use my car."
Synthesis
Based on my own research findings and the Rice students' main pain points, I synthesized three major points that I decided was important to address in my project.
IDEATION AND LOW-FI
Ideating a Solution
Based on the ideas compiled from the initial user interviews, I created a flow diagram to better understand the relationships between the different possible screens. I color coded these into different interfaces into groups that could represent the key pages on the navigation bar.
DESIGN GUIDE
Estabilishing an identity
The average target user for this new transportation app is a highly ambitious college student seeking a quick and easy way to get around the Rice University area. Keeping this user base in mind, I created a design guide to create a cohesive user interface for the final prototype with a modern take, complete with sans-serif fonts, rounded corners, and saturated accent colors to supplement the dominant app colors.
It was important to us to think about the product branding and identity early, so I created some colorful key graphics that showed the app's personality.
BRANDING
HI-FI ROUND 1
Uni-versal & Uni-versity
When redesigning RideSystems, I considered my target audience: young, academically-driven ingenues with places to be. They want a straight-forward, well-designed app to guide them on their scholarly journey.
Riding the routes
The revamped Routes page is the centerfold of the Unibus app, focused on the user's most commonly used busses to provide a customized experience. Specific stops can be associated with routes and alert the user as to when to start walking to their bus stop.
Safety and Reminders
Unibus provides special request features, like the night escort that takes students home during night hours, an on-demand service for any special accessibility needs, a charter bus for class and club trips, and a lost and found recovery system.
Unibus allows users to customize what routes, stops, and time periods they get notifications for, making sure reminders can be userful and not bothersome.
NOTIFY ME
Creating My Stops
The new "My Stop" feature allows users to add their own custom location pins at specific locations around campus. The app can calculate the nearest stop for a specific route and the user can create a location link between a stop and their specific building.
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FINAL PROJECT PLANNING
What's next for Unibus?
There are many more exciting things happening with the future of Unibus in the coming months! The final project proposal involves a redesign of the transportation system routes, bus stops, and physical signage.
UNIBUS NEXT STEPS
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User Testing: Even though I developed a high-fidelity prototype of the app from the initial user interviews, we still need to conduct some rounds of testing to validate our design decisions.
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Route Transformation: We want to redesign the routes that the busses take around campus to be efficient, accessible, and sustainable, to discourage car use and encourage bussing!
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Prototype Signage: The most tangible part of our redesign will be the physical signage and a prototype bus stop design, complete with renderings. This design is meant to be repeated across campus to all of the stops, creating a cohesive system.
ROUTE TRANSFORMATIONS
High transport-ance
The existing routes at Rice University are created by the Rice University transportation department, headed by Eugen Radulescu. My team and I met with Eugen to discuss the potential of altering the existing routes based on student needs, creating a clear and cohesive set of bus stops, and integrating our design style into the route representation.
INTERVIEWS
To see what could be improved, I gathered the same group of students' insights regarding the existing routes, the bus stops, and signage on campus.
Existing routes
Looking at the existing routes and how they are represented, a lot of the students that we interviewed were in consensus regarding the confusing spacing and naming conventions of the bus stops, the inadequate access to off-campus housing locations, and the lack of undergraduate access to Rice Village, the primary food stop location for students.
Inspiration
When developing the new routes, we took inspiration from the New York subway lines - using different colors to denotate categories. For accessbility, we wanted two forms of identification for each icon, so we adopted a color + text abbreviation combination.
Proposed Routes
The routes that we have proposed for the transporation department consider the students' feedback regarding the bus stops, signage, and desired locations. They are broken into five different color-coded categories based on zones/uses: On Campus, Off Campus, Rice Village, Med Center, and Shopping.
Signage Design
Our plan was to create signage that is readable and informative, creates a direct link to the Unibus app, and has an obvious and cohesive design aesthetic. It was a priority that the signage system could be easiy integrated to the existing ones that labeled buildings to reduce costs and minimize impairment of visual lines across campus.
COLOR BLOCKING
Each sign is 12" in width but can extend in height by increments of 3.5" depending on the number of routes that utilize the stop. The color blocks on the left side show the category of shuttle the routes fall into for users to be able to quickly scan for information.
SIGNAGE RENDERING
The image to the left shows an example of how these new bus signs would attach and easily integrate into Rice University's existing signage system.
FINAL INTERVIEWS
Feedback frenzy
After creating our first hi-fi prototype, we conducted a round of user testing including an interview with the head of transportation, Eugen Radulescu, to have feedback from both the direct users and the administration. I also presented this project to some high-level professionals in the UX design field to gain design-related feedback.
POSITIVES
IMPROVEMENTS
"I enjoyed the design scheme and the simplification of the colors from the original app to your team's iteration."
"The integration of the My Stops feature would definitely help me customize the app and make it my own."
"The organization of the navigation bar and the overall interface is very clear and easy to read."
"Being able to connect with my bus drivers and also learn a bit about them is a very good move toward connecting students with university staff, and they deserve more recognition!"
"In terms of accessibility, you could consider having more color differentiation and other accessible options in the settings.
"Consider further simplification / consistency for certain design elements and delineate it in the design system."
"Group the routes by color / region to create a mental association."
"Examine the steps taken in the My Stops because the interface is currently confusing to users."
Design systems
Hearing the design feedback helped me hone in on the design elements that needed to be consistent and to choose my design decisions more deliberately. I created an updated design system to organize our aesthetics and logic based on our feedback and route / signage development.
FINAL HI-FI DESIGN
Creative culmination
All of the research, design studies, and interviews conducted were incredibly important to creating our final hi-fidelity design. Our final project is the culmination of our informed route designs for the shuttles, signage designs, additional app features, and redesigned app interfaces.
Unibus as a whole aims to promote sustainable ways of transportation, values accessibility for the shuttle system to all, and creates a customizable, easy-to-use set of interfaces to get students and staff to where they need to go.
Routes Interface
The Routes interface allows users to see their favorited (most commonly-used) routes and where these shuttles are within the university boundary. Users can see their custom stops on the map and the app can estimate when to start walking to their respective stops.
My Stops
My Stops allows users to add customized locations that they frequent and link them to routes so the app can estimate when the user should walk to a certain stop.
Requests, Team, Settings
The Requests tab allows users to make special transportation requests for safety, educational, and accessibility reasons. The Team tab allows riders to connect with the transportation team in a more meaningful way, and also displays all of the routes together. The Settings tab allows users to customize their Unibus experience.
Unibus
Unibus is an advanced digital transportation solution for university students to track shuttles around campus, focused on accessibility and sustainability.
Congrats! You made it to the end of this page.
Hope you enjoyed coming along for the ride, and I truly appreciate you taking the time to check out my work! You can reach me at amyzh425@gmail.com — I'd love to chat with you.