Smart Commute: Transit UX Research
Interviewed student commuters and found the problem was never the route.
Project screenshot and interface documentation for Smart Commute: Transit UX Research will be uploaded here.
Every transit app optimizes the route. Nobody I interviewed was actually losing time to the route.
I led a team through interviews with student commuters, and what came back was that the pain is uncertainty, transfers, and the dead time in between. You can shave four minutes off someone’s path and change nothing about their day. We synthesized that into a problem statement and prototyped around the journey rather than the ETA.
I’m keeping it here because it’s the first time I ran the whole loop: talk to people, work out the real problem, decide what to build, then defend the decision. The prototype was the deliverable. Problem definition was the actual skill.
It’s also the reason this site is laid out like a transit map, so the project has outlived its own semester twice.