Connecting commuters to make commuting fun and safe
Deliverables
End-to-end product design
Tools
Figma, Notion
Context
In the UX class at UFT, I, along with a team of designers, designed a solution to kill loneliness and boredom while commuting for long periods while making commuting safer for those feeling unsafe during odd-hour commutes.
In 8 weeks, we ran user interviews, synthesized findings, ideated, designed, and tested our solutions with potential users.
Talking to commuters
We conducted structured interviews with 10 commuters between the age of 18-50 to learn about their behaviors, pain points, and expectations around commuting.
Pain Point #1
Solo commuters often feel isolated during long travel periods. One commuter described this as "the most stressful part of my day," adding that they actively dread it.
Pain Point #2
Many commuters feel unsafe on public transit, particularly when traveling alone during off-peak hours when vehicles and stations are nearly empty.
Research Outcome
With the insights we gathered from the research, we synthesized the findings into major themes.
Exploring Possibile solutions
The team came up with ideas that we could implement as a digital solution to solve commuter’s problems and using a prioritization matrix we extracted the most impactful ideas.
Our happy path
Because of the time constraints, we focused on our core task flow and ideated on our solution.
This included coming up with sketches and compiling them in a way that looks cohesive and lets commuters find a travel buddy.
Feature 1:
Find a fellow commuter traveling to a similar destination using the same means of transport.
Feature 2:
What is this commuter like? The tags allow users to learn about commuters before they send requests to share the trip.
Testing the happy path with commuters
The designed solution was tested with 5 commuters to evaluate the process of finding a travel companion. A 5-second test was conducted to capture users' initial impressions, followed by a think-aloud protocol to gather real-time feedback during navigation.
Here are the major changes made after testing.
The solution
Travel Buddies
Conclusion
The aim of this project was to come up with the most viable solution with the constraints we had. We presented our project to industry leaders from IBM and Autodesk and received positive feedback.