OVERVIEW
It was a class project for my course "Touch-based User Interface Design" in NCCU and also the project for "Highway Public Transport Competition" held by Transportation Bureau in Taiwan.
TEAM MEMBERS
洪佩妤、劉映汝、林欣儀、藍子琪
TIME
April 2020 - June 2020
MY ROLE
Background study
Part of UI flow, Flow chart
Wireframe, Visual design
and Prototype
. . .
Background
In the mid-term plan of the Transportation Bureau of the Taichung City Government, Wuri ( 烏日 ) Transit Center will build as an important transportation hub, connecting the two major public transportation systems surroundings ─ MRT and bus transport stations to provide passengers with comprehensive mass transit services.
However, although Taichung currently has more than 700 bus stop panels, most of them still use non-interactive panel or paper lists, which cannot effectively simplify important information and provide it to passengers in real time.
. . .
Define the Problem
Public transportation supply and demand
• Analysis of the current status of Taichung's public transportation system
According to the 2018 municipal statistical analysis updated by Taichung Accounting Office, the public transportation system is not the most commonly used transportation vehicle for most people. As you can see in Figure 1, the current utilization rate of public transportation is about 20%.
However, after the Taichung city government said that taking bus is free of charge within ten kilometers and adjusted bus network, more and more people began to use public transportation systems. At the same time, it can be found at Figure 2 that the passenger using Taichung Railway has also been increasing year by year.
Figure 1
Figure 2
• Analysis of Taichung Transit Center
There are eight main transit centers in Taichung and the one of this project, Wuri（烏日） Transit Center, is the main station for connecting the high-speed rail station and the Taichung urban area.
If travelers taking the high-speed rail to Taichung and want to go to the urban area, there are only two choice of public transportation for them currently: Taiwan Railway and Bus. However, during their time for transferring, they will face the problems listed below:
• Time gaps ─ inconsistency between different kinds of transportation.
• Information gaps ─ the information about the transfer place cannot be effectively obtained
So, even if the Taichung bus is free of charge within ten kilometers, passengers still choose private vehicles with higher costs, such as taxi and Uber, to leave the high speed rail station.
Stakeholders
After we digged into this problem, we found out that in the whole transfer process and the setting of the new stop panel there are five important stakeholders: Government, transit people, cooperative transportation units, related manufacturers, and media.
We want to establishing communication channels to understand the aspects and needs of each stakeholders with different rights and interests, evaluate the importance of concerns of the stakeholders, and consider the related risks and conflicts that may arise during cooperation, so as to prevent problems in advance and establish a good and long-term cooperative relationship.
Information concerned by stakeholders and how we communicate with them
Goals
In order to effectively solve the problems mentioned above, we tried to design our new interactive bus stop panel. The goal of this project is to improve the existing bus stop of the Wuri ( 烏日 ) Transit Center, applying touch interface and user-friendly design so that passengers can no longer be passively received the information, but can interact with the transport information by themselves.
. . .
Design Process
01. UI flow
At the beginning, we used UI Flow to list the functions and pages needed for this project, including three main functions: search for bus route, search for different kinds of transportation, and other functions, such as using QR code to provide feedback.
02. Flow chart
After finishing the UI flow, we tried to sketch out our flow chart. Flow chart can help us to confirm how users operate, and how the system should respond to them.
03. Wireframes
After finishing the flow chart, we tried to sketch out our wireframes and figure out how to connect each page. The size of the wireframe is based on the size of the existing stop panel (91 cm * 28 cm) at the Taichung High Speed Rail Station.
The bottom of the panel is about one meter off the ground and the top area of the panel is for advertisement since it cannot be touched easily.
04. Mockups
Basically the visual design is the screen-by-screen pixel-perfect visualization of the wireframes in detail. Orange, white and gray were chosen as the main colors because they are also the main color of Taiwan High Speed Rail and the icons were kept light to make the page look simple.
05. Prototype
. . .
Expected results
・Make it easy for people that have different familiarity with electronic products to use.
・Passengers no longer passively receive the information, but can actually interact with the data by touching the screen.
・Provide clearer instructions for transferring to improve the efficiency of public transportation.
・Expand the service to other areas in Taichung, or even to the whole country.
Expected profit
Take the establishment of five stop signs as the standard. After evaluating the panel price, maintenance cost and electricity bill, it costs about $12221 to set up the panel for the first month and $4240 per month thereafter.
And the estimated advertising cost for each board is $880/month, so the income that can be obtained from this setting is $4400/month, which can turn losses into profits after ten months.
Expected bus traffic
We hope to increase the bus transfer rate by 5% so the annual bus traffic will ultimately increase by approximately 600,000 passengers since the number of outbound passengers per year is about 11,000,000.
. . .
What I Learned
Different from the size of common devices, there are more factors to consider when designing this bus stop panel. We need to know the height and width of the stop panel. Try to put important information at a height parallel to the user's line of sight, and place the option buttons within the range that most users can touch, so as to provide the best user experience.
With the experience of this project, I learned that I need to carefully consider the actual situation when designing and think about what kind of design can convey the message to our users most accurately.
. . .
Conclusion
It was a great experience to participate in the competition to make our society better and more convenient, we even won the prize for 10 thousands Taiwanese dollars in the first stage of the competition.
In addition, working with teammates that are from different department make me think more creatively and thoughtfully than I was before. In the future, I will still keep improving the design to maximize every stakeholders' benefits and try to provide a better user experience for the users.