What’s Frederick?

Frederick is Maryland’s Largest County by Land. Although, it is small like the state, it is 667.7 square miles long. It only takes 1 hour to drive from either Baltimore or Washington D.C.  It has a total population of 279,835 people. The average commute time for a Frederick resident is 34.8 minutes.  (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020-2021)

*Source: frederickcounty.gov/DocumentCenter

Frederick's Public Transportation

TransIT provides public transit, paratransit and commuter services/employer outreach information throughout Frederick County, MD serving medical, employment, education, shopping centers and more.

Problem Distillation

Young adults are having trouble tracking bus statuses, stop times information, and use cash-only transactions.

Research

My research process involves two types of data, statistical data and user input. The user surveys were completed using Google Forms. All statistics and data came from Frederick county's website as well as the US census bureau.

Key Insights

Pulled from a survey data-pool of 12 Transit riders, most users who are young adults who work in the Frederick area.  Riders say the current system is slow.  It takes 45 minutes to 2 hours to commute.  They also are in need of more pick up times and route information.  Lastly, they need and interactive map with real-time tracking of buses.

Minimum Viable Product

The minimum viable product is to design a mobile application that allows a Frederick user/rider to purchase tickets, use their phone as a pass, and check route status via a live map.

After all the user data is analyized and key insights have been established, We need to visual communicate who are target user is in order to empathize more efficiently. Below are 2 different personas based of the average Frederick rider.  (Note: These are best viewed on the desktop site.)

Information Architecture

After we completed the personas, there is a need to outline how the application should be structured. I organized this into 5 categories: 

1. Transit News - Where they can recieve updated information about contruction, road closings, traffic, and anything else that might add to the overall commute time.

2. Routes - This would display all the route information that the Frederick Transit system has to offer. Allowing users to easily access what bus they need, where the bus stop is located, and when does it  arrive/depart.

3. Ticket Information - As the name suggests, this is where a rider can select what kind of pass they want to purchase. Whether the pass is for a day, a month, or a year, It all will operate as an easy QR code on the app.

4. Interactive Map - If it is important to us, we like to check statuses on where things are going. This is a page that coordinates the exact bus location on a map where the rider can visual check the estimated time of arrival.

5. Settings - Every single app has some sort of settings, this one is no different. Users can adjust their profile, display settings, and notifacations of late bus arrivals/news.

In approaching the visualzation techniques, I've focused my efforts on making the core elements to their bare components. This will allow more of a consistant style to the look and feel of the application. The challenge here was to find fonts/colors that most represents simplicity and ease of use. 

Usability Testing Results

During the last phase of usability testing, I received some helpful and much needed feedback from the testers. 

Pros - Many felt that this app functions a lot better than the main transit website. They thought the application was easy to navigate and most wished that this app was up and running in the app store for them to use this on a regular basis.

Cons - Most of the critques involved the prototype itself.  The lack of features were a pain point such as not being able to pinch and zoom.  One user pointed out that the ticket purchase feature is nice but Transit is currently free. Knowing Frederick cut back its revenue in order to make it free for the pandemic year of 2020/2021, I believe the Frederick county government will eventually start charging for the service.

Prototype

This prototype was completed using Figma. I strongly reccomend using the Desktop website to access the prototype. Feel free to click the button below to go to the stand-alone version.

Conclusion

With Research, Planning, Ideating, Sketching, Wire-framing from Low to High Fidelity, Prototyping and User-Testing, this app took 150 hours to arrive to this stage.  However, I still want more time on this project, to get more users to test this out in Frederick City and get to a more human centered design approach.  I hope to do more collaborating with Engineers and Stakeholders to refine this concept to a Great Fully-Functional Tool for Frederick.