Student Transportation Application

UX / UI Design

Purpose

Originally a bus driver app designed to help districts assign drivers to bus routes, the app was redesigned to consider the whole ecosystem that uses the service as mass transportation.

We designed it to help

Students, Parents, Drivers and administration to: communicate, track, and Improve the safety of student passengers

Research

Communication with out clients uncovered a concern with the lack of accountability for students ridding the bus systems.

No way to track who was suppose to be riding
No way to track if students were actually getting on the busses

Parents shared similar concerns. There current method of validation is to wait at the bus stop with their kids to see if they get on or off the bus.

Drivers currently rely on school ID cards to validate if a student should be on their bus or not. No other viable form of management is available currently.

Design for safety through communication

We took the key points of concern for each group and accounted for features that would help improve communication. Tracking the experience of the process from start to finish we created an UI view for each person.

To keep the apps simple we only display the options and information relevant to each use type.

Wireframing a few view templets that handled list view, Notification, messenger and a few simple actions helped me cover the fundamentals

Personas
Key Users

Students

Parents

Admins

Drivers

Technical Constraints

Data mining constraints required us to simplify what information fields we used to collect and cross assign between the students, parents and drivers.
The options and features for the Admin were to complex to handle in a mobile app so we keep them in the desktop UI for the PaaS (Platform as a System)

Driver View

Parents View

Students View

Trial and Error

Initially we had a student view, but after taking into consideration the percentage of students that may not have a phone we removed it from the App.

The integration of google maps into the app wasn't handled as well as it could have been. We referenced apps like lyft and uber to get a better feel of how to improve on the integration and use. I had to modify the UI complements for more clarity on the map as well.

Admin View

Implementation

The initial release was to a single district who was a current client. While we were able to gather feedback from their staff, the parents were a little harder to track down for commentary.

When we did get feedback from both sides the implementation was over all good and a vast improvement over what they were doing currently.

Top things commented on were the increase in accountability and communication

What did we learn?

Feedback functionality is important to have in an app to gain the users perspective on how Its doing and where you can improve for them.
When considering the complexity of an app, always consider the potential scope of its use in terms of data and potential user volume.
In some cases, not all members of an apps ecosystem have to have a UI.