MBTA Digitizing the MBTA
MBTA Digitizing the MBTA
Problem:
The MBTA, with over 200 million rides per year, stands out as one of the largest mass public transit systems in the United States. However, it pails behind the MTA, New York City’s Mass Transit System, and other mass transit systems across the world in regards to the overall user experience. After doing research on our competition, the team and I set out to modernize the MBTA with the use of interactive and user friendly digital screens to decrease ridership anxiety through improving wayfinding experiences.
How might we increase acessibility within the stations?
How might we improve the user experience on
wayfinding and visualizing their journey?
Me and my group members decided to record human behavior on the MBTA to get a better understanding of its riders. This included us recording behavior at the Orange Line stations and behavior inside the train car. We would soon take the qualitative data and use this to create some user personas to better understand our audience.
Key findings include:
-Heavy relience on mobile applications to navigate MBTA which may hurt an older audeince, or those with no acess to a smart cellular device
-Physical maps recieve little to no interaction
-Train car map headers show inconsitiencies in direction between different lines, i.e Inbound is shown going right for the green lines, however it is shown going right for the orange line
For the digitized map screenheaders, I closely followed the MTA’s upcoming header model and interactions/information given to the user. The numbers under the station name represent the amount of stops needed to reach it.
I decided that there should be two phases of the map header screens. These phases would further give context to the riders on where they are currently and what actions should be taken if appropiate on their journey. One phase is shown once the train is arriving at a destination, and the other phase is shown once the train is boarding at a station. The “1”, will turn into a “
Vertical train screens are exclusive to the green lines as they are TRAM services.
Outcome:
After presenting this idea to my fellow peers, I was met with praise for how well the UI elements accurately followed the MBTA. This was achieved by studying the MBTA brand guidlines closely. Since this was a final project I was also met with praise from UI/UX professionals in the industry who saw value in the idea of modernizing the MBTA.
I was able to serve a broad audience and get great learning experience in ground research and in creating user workflows for this project.
Project Information