Overview
During the Fall quarter over 6000 students move on campus in 3 days! This creates an opportunity to help students understand how to use the SCAD Bee Line Bus Service. In this project we identified the pain points due to which international students find it difficult to utilize the service. Through user insights, interviews and co-creation workshops we lay across solutions that would improve the students experience while using the service.
Problem
Public transportation is provided by SCAD and allows students to ride safely and free of cost across the fragmented urban campus. Currently, SCAD’s promise is a door-to-door mobility service for all students.
During fall quarter, over 6,000 students move on campus in three days. This influx of new riders, international and new-to-the-area students, creates an opportunity to help students learn about, understand and utilize this service for a successful academic career at SCAD.
The present transit system is lacking in efficiency, safety, transparency, reliability across the service ecosystem and as a result students find the mobility offerings inadequate when it comes to meeting their needs.
Audience
SCAD University students, faculty, and staff who must commute to class across a disjointed urban academic campus.
Failures
The current transit system is lacking in efficiency, safety, transparency, reliability and as a result students find the mobility offerings inadequate when it comes to meeting their needs.
New Value
The idea that university students can have a better knowledge, understanding and mobility experience that promises dependability and sustainability and allows them to move around a disjointed urban campus efficiently by leveraging the university-exclusive mobility services.
Opportunity
Improve access to the transit systems provided by the university via a well synchronized service ecosystem that allows students to check, schedule and plan their trips in advance using a broad range of interactions and touchpoints that come into play across the service.
Risk
Mobility solution that works worse than the current system and does not provide students with the transit information they need.
In the first phase of the project, we surveyed and interviewed students to learn more about their experience using the SCAD Bus service. Their struggles with inconsistent timelines, lack of signage in some stops and other issues. We also interviewed Bus Drivers to understand how was a typical work day for them, learning about their problems backstage and more. Finally we got the chance to interview the SCAD Director of Security and Transportation.
Core Insights from Research
Stakeholder Map
We were able to build a Stakeholder map with the information gathered, to have a broad systemic view of the service and how value is co-created.
The insights gathered from those statements gave us the idea of where some problems originated and also allowed us to detect some miscommunication issues in the bus timelines.
Student Journey Map
Actual Service
Future Service
Drivers' Journey Map
Actual Service
Future Service
With the gathered data, Journey Maps were created for both Students and Drivers to visualize each step of their experience, with their overall satisfaction level during each step. For the students, most of the cases involved misinformation or other problems before actually boarding the bus: Confusing or misleading information could not let them plan properly their journey to their classes. On the other hand, due to their lack of familiarity with the city they did not know how far they were from their destination. In the case of the Drivers, they lacked a proper rest area or place to lunch, given that they work for long shifts due to both employee shortage and personal economic reasons.
We developed some co-creation sessions of potential solutions to the problems stated above. Based on that input, we categorized and selected some ideas based on their high impact and low effort to implement. We proceeded to build the new service blueprint to visualize and communicate how the proposed solutions will fit the service; The front stage and backstage actions, and the physical evidence that support the new service.
Future Service Blueprint
The main solution to be implemented were prototyped to visualize how the new part of the service would look like, to collect feedback from stakeholders and iterate on the proposals.
The main solution to be implemented were prototyped to visualize how the new part of the service would look like, to collect feedback from stakeholders and iterate on the proposals.
Prototypes
After identifying areas in the service blueprint that could be improved, we focused on prototyping solutions around the orientation experience, the website, environmental signage and the app.
These visualizations are intended to gain feedback from others and provide a launching point for new solutions.
Online Experience - Student Orientation Experience
Process storyboarding to communicate how the students may be informed and have an immersive experience before starting classes.
Online Experience - Website Interaction
Website redesign to include multimedia orientation to students, and embedded information to replace present spreadsheet-based timelines that students find hard to understand.
Physical Environment
Improve campus signage system to consistently mark bus stop locations with color indication. Ensure the interiors of the buses have next stop signage displays and audio alerts
Transloc App Redesign Proposal
1
Open the Transloc App and enter your start & end location then hit Search
2
You will be shown the best routes available for your destination
3
You will be able to see detailed Route information once you hit the route option
My Takeaways
What did I learn through this project?
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The project was extremely relatable to me as an International Student new to the USA. The most important learning during this research was how to eliminate biases from personal experiences while interpreting the research data points.
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During the process of affinitization, carefully identifying key insights rather than solutions.
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The effort v/s impact grid to analyze and identify the solutions with the potential to highly impact even though the effort is low.
What could be improved?
Given the short timeline and strict budget, the focus for this project was on implementing solutions that take low effort and have a higher impact hence only the next stop signage display and audio alerts were implemented within all the bus interiors. Moving forward, other solutions could be implemented for a complete user experience.
Hope you enjoyed this project!