Challenge
Bus transportation ridership has significantly decreased in the past decade, riders feel that it is an inconvenient and inefficient form of transportation due to their experiences. Riders need a reliable, hassle free way to to get from point A to point B.
Solution
A biometric ticketing system that creates an easy on boarding experience for riders by decreasing boarding delays and hassle. The mobile application provides real time bus locations, alerts, and an easy payment method.
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As of 2017, ridership on bus transportation has dropped
a staggering 13% since 2007
research
As we noticed the declining use of bus transportation, we went straight out to local bus stops for human-centered research by interviewing bus transportation users on their experiences utilizing bus transportation services.
20 out of the 22 interviewees responded with negative experiences. Some of their pain points about their experiences included:
We affinitized our interviewee’s pain points and realized that there were three overarching categories that their pain points belonged in:
Along with primary research, we conducted extensive secondary research via online articles, surveys, and public transportation reports. Through all our findings and interviews we started to find insights along with who our target audiences were.
From these insights, we developed three very different personas of bus transportation riders; the tourist, the elderly, and the daily commuter. These personas allowed us to analyze why the riders use bus transportation, their goals, and their frustrations about their riding experiences.
We created a service blueprint that maps out an example of the rider’s journey along with their pain points during specific interactions wth the bus transportation services. The blueprint also displays the underlying front stage and back stage processes in order for the service to function. Having the front and back stage processes displayed showed us why the user experienced their pains in the first place.
Design Opportunity
We looked at the three categories and realized that we needed to create a design solution that fixed the user’s pain points such as:
Design Research
We wanted our solution to be feasible, yet viable. We began conducting an in depth current and future trends analysis pertaining to technology. Researching future and possible technology trends allowed us to discover innovative options to our design solution. My teammate Anna created this wonderful visual of the trends.
As a team we picked our top five technology trends and analyzed them thoroughly. One trend that caught our eye was biometric ticketing. At this day and age, almost all smartphones utilize some biometrics such as thumbprint and iris scanning. Users are becoming more comfortable with biometrics in everyday life. We researched more into the biometric trend and found transportation services in Europe are already beginning to move toward biometric ticketing. We came to a decision through a decision matrix that facial recognition biometrics would solve most of the pain points users are experiencing as they ride bus transportation.
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Our Solution
Bridge: an effortless, secure, and reliable form of bus transportation.
Our solution was to implement a biometric ticketing system within bus transportation. Biometric ticketing was an appropriate solution to the user pain points because of the easy, hassle-free nature of the technology.
Service Offering
The service offering map allowed us to break down the core, facilitating, and enhancing services that encompass our biometric ticketing system in a whole . Through this visual we mapped out how the user will be accessing, participating, and interacting with our service. What makes our solution so viable is how the system creates an efficient and fast user experience through the quality of interaction and participation. The biometric facial scanner allows the user to have a hassle free on-boarding.
Bridge is a mobile application in which the bus riders can set up their account by taking a picture of their face and linking their banking information. Our goal was to make the rider's journey as simple as possible once they set up their account via the mobile app, their face will be in the system which will guarantee them on boarding to the bus through the facial recognition system. This eliminates the hassle of having exact change, or a tangible bus pass to scan upon boarding. By doing this, boarding times will decrease which will make sure the rider will get to their destination on time. Paying is made easy by charging user's bank account the second you step off the bus.
Business Model Canvas
The business model canvas allowed us to visualize the key components of the biometric ticketing service. It helped us create and organizational structure for the service as well as the potential financial impact the service would have.
Wireframes for Mobile Application
When designing our application, or focus was to create an easy to use and reliable interface that prompts the user to have a hassle-free experience when utilizing bus transportation services.
Features
A fluent journey from point A to point B
Facial recognition ticketing system
Bus tracking
Notification system
Touch-less ticking
Trip planning
mobile application sitemap
We created a sitemap for the mobile application in order to create a hierarchal organizational structure of each page. We created this before designing the wireframes because it gave us a feel of how we wanted our application to function.
wireframes for mobile application
System Process
The system digram maps out how both the mobile application and biometric technology on the buses work together. It shows how once the data is input to the mobile application, the facial recognition technology receives that data in order to allow users on the bus.
Measuring the Impact
Our team understood that bus transportation services need to be able to measure the success for the biometric ticketing system in order to know how viable it is. We developed various Key Performance Indicators that are displayed on a dashboard so that employees and managers can check certain statistics throughout the day. They can measure how many riders are on the bus, the most popular routes, revenue, and also the busiest ridership hours, all displayed in easy to read visuals.
Wireframes for KPI Dashboard
Whats the impact?
Identifying the potential consequences of change, or estimating what needs to be modified to accomplish change is a very important aspect of implementing a new technology within an industry. As a team, we identified possible threats that could happen for the rider, bus driver, and bus transportation service itself from the implementation of the biometric ticketing system.
Thank you!
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My Contributions
Conducted primary and secondary research, service offering map, insight development, wire framing sketches, and systems diagram.
Team
Valentin Haak, Anna Khan, Rachel Tarulli, Andrew Zanoni
Timeframe
10 Weeks