Goals
The main goal of this project is to make it easier to catch the bus. We want the information at the heart of a successful bus trip, time, distance, and route, to be as clear as possible to as many types of people as possible.
We have two main types of bus riders: techies and the working class. The techies are primarily comprised of business professionals and students, who tend to choose to ride the bus. Both might find it cheaper to ride the bus than drive around Austin for work or school, and students, whether college or high school, may be limited in their choice of transportation because of the responsibilities entailed in using a car. The working class is comprised of people who may own cellphones, but might not speak fluent English or own a home computer.
We do not think it will be difficult to get the techies to use our new system. We expect the techies to log into the online account system and use the interface to customize their travel experience; they would also readily use the Firefox plugin. Deceminating important bus information to the working class is a different task. For this audience, we've created the BusBot, as well as the LED bus stop sign--which would display and voice information in multiple languages. (Besides providing a service to a wider audience of language speakers, these signs will also provide information to both the hearing and visually impaired.)
For the paper redesigns, the brochure and QUICKguides, the interaction is passive, with the only actions needed to be undertaken by the user are to search the text for the appropriate information. The LED bus stop displays are completely passive; users can read the display or listen to the voice for the next bus information. The pager is more interactive, but limited in the variety of interactions--with only 3 buttons, the simple interface will be easy to use by a variety of people with different educational and economic backgrounds. The online mapping and accounting system and the Firefox plugin will be the most interactive, and there will be a variety of choices and options for the user to select.
