A research and design project, part of the IDEO 'Insights for Innovation' course.
As part of the IDEO course 'Insights and Innovation', I conducted various forms of research on the topic of improving the experience for essential workers commuting via public transport during Covid lockdowns. Below will detail the various forms of research, the findings and mockups based on improvements that could be made via the Expressway Bus Site and a few other ideas.
Research - Observation
The first exercise I undertook was Observation, both online and in person. Online, I observed threads and complaints on Twitter that were directed at Irish public transport. Much of the issues I found were things I had experienced myself such as continues delays, cancellations and buses simply not showing up to some stops along the route.
In person, I planned to observe the situation on buses between my home town of Shannon and Limerick city but due to the shortage of seats and routes with the Covid pandemic, I decided to keep this to a minimum and only conduct observation while I would be taking the bus anyway for a necessary journey to avoid taking a spot needed by an essential worker
My main findings were that the majority of passengers seemed happy to comply with Covid guidelines, that there was a large uptake in people both using leap cards and purchasing tickets online via the Bus Eireann / Express Way sites, very few people used cash from what I could see.
Research - Interview
The next step in the project was conducting an interview. I wrote up a short script of 8 questions and interviewed a friend who was an essential worker in a Pharmacy, I had to adapt to Covid by performing this interview over Zoom. This person also commuted via the same bus route I had used for my observation so I felt the experience I had myself would help here. To summarise, this worker was very frustrated with the lack of visibility on where buses were, updates when there were cancellations / delays and also with the experience of the Bus Eireann site which they said had been a hit or miss experience with frequent bugs.
After the interview I felt like it backed up my original plan to focus on the reliability of the bus because. Discontent with how unreliable public transport in Ireland is in general was a running theme. I sorted my mine findings together on the chart below to aid with brainstorming ideas for improvemnts
Initial Sketches
There are a few fairly obvious improvements that are as simple as updating the existing timetables at bus stops, installing and improving 'real time' electronic timetables, improving stability of apps and sites from which commuters buy tickets etc, so I thought I would try to focus on adding more functionality that could support the users. My main idea here was to implement seat booking (similar to how it is on Irish Rail) with the possibility of priority for essential workers, maybe in the form of pre-reserved seats that only essential workers can choose from. Below are some of my initial sketches:
I also liked the idea of being able to easily see what the next bus coming the your nearest stop is, giving you information on the last stop it was at, a more accurate arrival arrival time and possibly even real time updates on the amount of seats left (through maybe a mix of those that had already been booked and senors to know when a free seat had been taken by someone at a previous stop). I then moved on to higher fidelity mockups in Figma.
