Making transportation more safe, affordable, and convenient for students through the creation of ridesharing groups.
Background
In a quarter-long project for the User Experience for Interactive Media course at UC Santa Cruz, I collaborated with three other designers to create a fully-designed solution to improve the frustrating transportation experience UC students commonly face today.
Onboarding slides for Safely
The Challenge
College students typically don’t have access to reliable, affordable, and safe transportation. The existing options, such as Loop Buses, Metro Buses, Lyft, Uber, and Zipcar, are not suitable enough because they are either too expensive, unreliable, time-consuming, or have too many safety risks.
The Solution
From research and ideation to a final prototype, we fully researched and designed the mobile app Safely to make transportation more safe, affordable, and convenient for students. In our app design and branding, we prioritized safety and comfortability for students within the UC community.
Saving costs on gas and promoting sustainability
Ridesharing allows people to split money on gas, making rides more affordable and environmentally friendly than multiple people taking their own individual rides through other ridesharing apps such as Uber and Lyft.
Ridesharing is convenient and reliable
Safely allows users to schedule rides in advance and displays navigation with each stop to ensure everyone gets to their destination in the most time-efficient way possible.
Prioritizing safety and comfort for users
Leading with Research
During the preliminary stages of our design process, we conducted user research interviews with seven college students from UC Santa Cruz to understand our target users’ goals and frustrations with their current available methods of transportation in their daily lives.
After conducting seven interviews with participants that fell under our end-user group, our team found that most college students seek fast, reliable, inexpensive, and safe methods of transportation.
Though college students currently use public transportation, transportation apps, or car rental services to get to their destinations; they report that their needs are often not being met by these methods of transportation and that often ends up giving them a frustrating experience when traveling around.
Early Design Concepts
To start ideating on potential design concepts, we utilized the Crazy 8 methodology to generate a wide variety of design concepts for five main pages in our app. Our team made 160 sketches in total and held a silent dot voting session to determine what design concepts were the most favored towards addressing user needs.
Low Fidelity Prototype Designs
For the purposes of gaining early feedback, our team designed a low fidelity prototype that would later be tested to receive early user insights.
Branding and Design System
After we had our main design concept validated, we defined our app’s branding and visual design. Throughout this process, we defined the app’s new name, color palette, logo, typography, and common components.
High-Fidelity Designs
Using our findings from our user studies, and the newly created design system we built, we created the high-fidelity designs. For the high-fidelity designs, I worked on the Message, Schedule, and Profile flows.
Usability Test & Findings
Following the creation of our first high-fidelity prototype, we ran usability testing studies to evaluate and improve upon the design of Safely.
For our usability tests, we recruited eight UCSC students that fell under our intended end-user group, and ran our usability tests over Zoom. Each test ranged from 20-30 minutes, and participants shared their screen and were instructed to use the talk-aloud method.
Design Iterations & Additions
To address the usability findings, our team brainstormed actionable design recommendations and solutions to fix each usability finding.
Finalized Prototype
After receiving feedback from our users and brainstorming these solutions to the usability issues and improvements to the Safely app as a whole, we iterated on the user flows and available features and interactions to create our final prototype.
Reflections
Working on Safely has helped me grow tremendously as a UX Designer and Researcher because I was able practice first hand how experienced designers collaborate together as a team for an end to end project. In the early stages, I was a bit unsure on how our team was going to keep our design work consistent when there were multiple designers working on the project. However, the creation of the design system and active communication of our team was key in keeping all of our work consistent and manageable despite how fast paced our project was. Overall, my experience working on Safely has been invaluable to me and has greatly improved my abilities to present, critique, and collaborate with other designers.
