Transit Kiosk

Brief

Imagine your team has been hired by the local transit authority to review the user experience of their ticketing machines and propose practical design changes. There isn’t a budget to replace any of the machines or produce and rollout new signage, so the goal is to make improvements to the touch screen interface, which can be rolled out via a software update.

Your job is to visit nearby transit stations to observe how users purchase tickets in context. Then take your findings to make suggestions for how to improve the interface of the ticket machines.

Suggestions

• Plan questions with your team before starting your investigation.
• Find transit stations nearby to make observations and ask questions. If there are multiple types of transit ticketing machines near you, focus your investigation on only one type (e.g. bus or metro, but not both).
• Prototype quickly so you don’t have to stick with your first idea.
• Test your prototype with classmates by giving them scenarios to role-play and observing where they succeed and where they fail.

Considerations

Keep the following questions in mind as you work:

• What actions are people generally taking?
• Are there existing pain points in the process?
• How do your proposed design changes improve things?

Presentation

Your presentation should cover the following:

• How did you work together as a team?
• What did you discover from your observations?
• Demonstrate how someone would use your kiosk.
• What would you do differently next time?

Prototyping & Testing

With your team, you’ll improvise a station in the classroom, which you’ll use to simulate the environment and test your interface ideas on paper.

When it’s time to present, we’ll visit each group’s station so they can walk us through what they made and why.