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Transportation and the successful growth of a future smart city like Seattle go hand in hand. Without constantly evolving, efficient, and convenient mobility options that growth becomes stunted. As a result, for our capstone project, advised by Amazon, we decided to focus on multimodal transportation in the Seattle area. 

 
In our research, we learned that commuters across the United States have a strong desire to move smart, quickly, and cost-effectively and currently do all they can to ensure they move that way, such as by planning their trips in advance and making the best out of their available transportation options.

There is also an exciting and burgeoning trend of using multimodal transportation to get around. This includes, but is not limited to, driving, biking, walking, and using public transportation to move. While multimodal transportation has transformed mobility patterns like never before, there still exist major pain points that need to be addressed so that this form of transportation can better address a commuter’s personal needs and preferences and be a smoother, less frustrating process. 

2021

Seattle as a smart city

120k

New residents

70%

Multimodal usage

Introduction
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Organizations

Master's Capstone Project

 

Advised by

My Responsibilities

  • Visual & Interaction Design

  • Voice UX Design

  • Information Architecture

  • Motion Design

  • Low-Fi & High-Fi Prototype Testing

  • Formative Research

  • Project Management

Duration

Dec 2018   —  Aug 2019

Platform

Mobile app (with VUI)

My Roles

Lead UX Designer

Design Researcher

Team

Sayena Majlesein

Sophia Li

Challenge

How might we facilitate transportation for multimodal commuters and provide them with a travel system that will allow them to transport themselves in a personalized and time-efficient manner?

Challenge
Formative Research
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Participant profile

I designed and used a screener to recruit these participants and received over 100 responses. 

The study was comprised of 12 participants, that are a sample of commuters in the Seattle area with multimodal behaviors who tend to use different modes of transportation based on the trip they take every day.

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Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis

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Expert Interviews

Expert interviews

Our goal in recruiting transportation experts was to gain a deeper understanding of the external factors that contribute to the formation of transit patterns in individuals and society at large.

These factors include transportation policies, short-term/long-term traffic plans, public transit services, current transit pain points, and potential opportunities and threats caused by the transportation system in the Seattle area.

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To bridge the current world of transit to the speculative future of transportation in the Seattle area, I recruited traffic experts from the Seattle Department of Transportation, as well as the University of Washington.

experts
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Interviews

Semi-structured interviews

Conducting 7 Semi-structured interviews allowed us to gain a more holistic understanding of multimodal transportation, the people that use it, how they use it, and what their needs and behaviors are.

Insight #1

Transit apps narrow mobility behaviors by offering limited alternatives and information.

"The problem is I never know if the bus has any space left on its bike rack till I get there and see."

- Alia, she takes her bike everywhere

Fly On The Wall

Fly on the wall

We conducted one collective session of a 150-minute observation of commuters during morning rush hour in U-District between the hours of 8:00 am - 10:30 am in the middle of the workweek. Special attention was paid to observing if commuters used different modes of transportation, such as bikes, skateboards, or rideshare, to get to and from different link and bus stations in the Seattle area.

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Insight #2

Transit Lack of multimodal integration on a technological, physical, and financial level causes a lot of frustration for commuters and prevents them from developing new mobility habits.

Diary Study

Diary study

While the participatory design workshop and the semi-structured interviews allowed participants to discuss their thoughts around the transportation system using a storytelling method, the diary study enabled us to explore the real-life experience of participants by studying their everyday interactions with the Seattle area and its transportation systems.

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Insight #3

In order for multimodal integration to be successfully implemented in a city, it has to replicate the sense of freedom, independence, and convenience private cards provide.

"Access to cars gives a lot of people what they want: Freedom. Freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want."

- Armin has written in his transit diary

Participatory Design

Participatory design workshop

I designed the structure and activities of the participatory design workshop to understand people’s pain points, attitudes, and expectations towards transportation and design solutions WITH them.

Design Principles

Design principles

Seamless

Personalized

Durable

Ideation

Ideation

We analyzed the results of the participatory design workshop and used  Crazy 8's ideation method. As a result, we came up with 150 concepts.

Then, we created a decision matrix according to our insights and design principles and started narrowing down concepts to select the top 3 concepts.

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Top three

Proposed solution

After analyzing the concepts and applying multiple down-selection methods, we proposed a concept that would include the core values of our top three concepts: transit accommodation, real-time info, and VUI transit recommendation. 

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Concept Validation

"It's something that I would definitely use. I use SpotHero to find a parking space and Google Maps to go to different places...so having  access to all of them in one place would be pretty cool."

- Sarah uses bus and her private car

Project Management

Project management

I used my project management skills to breakdown the project into actionable user stories and allocate a sufficient amount of time to usability testing and design research.