Many Atlantans use MARTA to commute to work. They rely on the app to find out when the train will arrive so they can be at the station on time. The app is poorly organized, with seemingly endless menus, large tables of information that are difficult to digest, and too many steps to discover train or bus arrival times. These things make the app unreliable for customers and reduce reliability and ridership on MARTA.
Objective: The primary objective of this project is to optimize trip planning by leveraging geolocation and reducing steps to discover train arrival time to a station. The specific objectives include:
Simplify the user journey to train and bus arrivals
Reorganizing the app menu and sitemap
Update design to make more information more digestible
Team: This is a concept design I created for a solo design challenge. The brief was to improve something I regularly used and cared about, so I drew inspiration from my experience as a person living and commuting in Atlanta.
Process: Using the jobs-to-be-done framework, I created the following statement to design around: “I want to know when the train will arrive at the station when commuting to work so that I can be on time without missing the train.”
Upon opening the existing app experience, there are four screens to discover train arrivals into a given station (Arts Center).
Discovery of train arrival times to stations can be simplified by leveraging location services and opening to a map with the user’s current location and displaying the train arrival times for the two stations closest to the user.
With the remaining time left in the design challenge, I reorganized the site map and app content, designed a left hand menu opening from a hamburger button to replace the menu buttons previously along the bottom of the screen, and updated the type hierarchy to establish patterns that made the information tables of schedule times much easier to read and digest.
Conclusion: I successfully completed the design challenge, achieving the objectives of optimizing trip planning by leveraging location services, reorganizing the app, and updating the design to make it more digestible. I believe this app redesign would increase reliability on MARTA and encourage ridership. As a bonus, I earned a job offer from the company I was interviewing with which was the occasion for the design challenge.