ORCA+

Summary

For our senior capstone, myself and a group of students, with the help of our sponsors (King County Metro, Sound Transit, Seattle Department of Transportation, CoMotion Mobility Innovation Lab), created a program to help incentivize vulnerable populations to ride transit.

Team

Rose Guttman (me): Project Manager/UX Researcher

Khadijah Jordan: UX Designer

Christina Smith: UX Researcher

Nicole Washington: UX Designer

Above is a graph of our timeline. We had a total of 8 weeks to complete this project

How can we incentives vulnerable populations (people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged) to ride transit?

Analysis

During the initial phase of our research, our team analyzed documents and studies on efforts to incentivize ridership and promote transit equity in Seattle and other cities such as Chicago and Indianapolis.

While the scope of some of the documents is larger than that of our research, they provided information about the effectiveness of reduced fares and fare-capping in incentivizing people to use public transit. Some material delved into barriers that low-income riders face as well as how low income riders may be disproportionately impacted by certain changes in transit policy.

Research

Our team interviewed 4 practitioners for this phase of the project. All the participants were connected to our user group either through working in transportation or other public health positions. Audio was recorded and then transcribed. The transcriptions for each interview were coded individually, and then we came together as a group to make a formal codebook, combining all of our codes. There are several larger themes throughout this codebook, including barriers, incentives, and outreach. Each code relates back to our research question: “How can we encourage vulnerable populations to ride transit?”

After completing the codebook, we each coded another person’s interview. We came together and found the most frequently used codes.

Transit and its Barriers

Reliance on Transit

Inaccessible Transit

Unaffordable Transit

Incentives

Variety of Incentives

Incentives Using Preloaded Passes

Multiple Modes of Outreach

Outreach

Using Paper Material for Outreach

The Value of Local Organizations for Outreach

Online Outreach

Ideation

In our ideation phase, we held two brainstorming sessions to outline design requirements and the overall structure of our rewards program. Holding brainstorming sessions allowed each of us to come up with ideas of our own before coming together as a group and getting feedback. Next, we created low fidelity mockups of our designs, to demonstrate how our system could operate in the real world. Creating low fidelity mockups was a quick and easy way to see what the system might look like and then continue to iterate on it.

Design

Usability tests were conducted at the beginning of this phase to help us get feedback on these mockups from participants not involved in the project. This feedback helped us ensure that all the language, imagery and screens were efficient, understandable and logically worked together from one to the next.

Our prioritized findings from the usability tests:

• Users do not want to receive texts displaying rewards they are not eligible for

• Users want the tap machine to tell them when a reward has been applied, not when it’s available.

• Users like the idea of the tap machine informing them of a reward.

• Users prefer simplicity in kiosk screens, this makes it easier to complete tasks.

• Users wanted clearer scenes in the storyboard depicting a user viewing and redeeming a reward.

• The storyboard successfully conveyed a logical and easily understandable scenario of a user interacting with the rewards program.

• The text messaging system is clear, concise, and possesses an appropriate tone for an automated system.

Next, we further iterated on our low fidelity mockups, adjusting them based on our usability test findings. After this, we created two posters for ORCA+. One was purely for advertisement purposes, and the other was created as a guide to people using the kiosk machine.

Conclusion

All of our work was presented to our stakeholders (King County Metro, Sound Transit, Seattle Department of Transportation, CoMotion Mobility Innovation Lab). As our project began in March of 2020, by June of 2020 these agencies were primarily focused on responding to the changes brought by the Coronavirus pandemic. Our work was well received, but due to the state of the world and shifting priorities, our work was never implemented.

Reflection

There are a few reasons I might be proud of a particular project. One is if it had a significant impact, especially if it’s measurable by something like KPIs. Another is if the team learned something very meaningful from the research, such as user mental models. Looking back at this work, I don’t think we learned anything profound, nor were the results of our work used, but I can’t help but admire the work we did. We planned this project from January to April of 2020, and very quickly it all had to change due to the nature of the world we were living in. We had plans to run participatory design sessions with our users in person, which had to be scrapped. Our team suddenly had to learn to use tools for virtual collaboration. The entirety of this project occurred as we all went through profound changes in our daily lives, and concerns about the future. I think it would have been very easy to give in to the stress of our new reality, and “phone it in.” Instead, we came together and found new ways to get the answers we needed, and met frequently for long hours to finish this work. Of course I am disappointed that our learnings and designs only live on in our portfolios (and at this point, almost 3 years later, maybe only mine), but that disappointment is overshadowed by the pride I feel, knowing we did the very best we could given the circumstances. This project taught me how to adapt to what seems unadaptable, which is a skill I’ve used many times since. I’m very proud of this work, and I hope that anyone that views it understands that this is more to showcase my resilience then perhaps anything else.

- Rose Guttman, January 27th, 2023