Research🤔

Due to the time frame given to us and how specific the users for the app are it was impossible to be able to have user interviews to empathize properly. So as an alternative we looked at posts and articles of people from the GTA that faced issues with transportation and with accessibility that faced issues.

We also created a Stakeholder Map to see who is involved with the project, how they are connected, and who’s needs to be prioritized

Define 💭

Personas:

From our user research, we created two personas, one of Jeffery a person with Cerebral Palsy, and Nora his Caregiver Nora, to get a better understanding of the needs of users and to refer back to while making the final design solution.

We conducted a Comparative Analysis of two apps to get a better understanding of the design we were aiming for. We choose to focus on Google Maps and Rocketman. Google Maps is one of the most used mapping apps so we used it as inspiration for a baseline but wanted to distill the information and focus more on accessibility. Rocketman was another app that did a great job with its real-time updates and is a mapping app made for Canada so it helped the 3/4 members that lives outside Canada to understand their public transportation better.

Ideate 💡

From what gathered from our User Research and Defining the problem we emphasized on 3 main features:

1. Discovering accessible public transit routes and helping people plan their trips in advance

2. Real-time updates, alerts, and schedules

3. The ability to tell your caregivers about your route

Since we got a solid understanding of what the app would be like and function we created a User Flow to see how the user would go about to complete a core task. While making the flow, I have kept some questions in mind: what are the users' expectations? Are there too many steps to complete the task?

Final Concept 🎨

The Outcome

Winning 2nd place - TWG, a Deloitte Business Problem Statement

McMaster Design League UI/UX Designathon 2021 - Closing Ceremonies

At 8:58 is when my team, Figamers, winning 2nd place was revealed

Reflection

Since this was my first designathon there were a lot of things I had to learn from my experience. An important and crucial aspect that I was emphasizing with my team was our timeframe and managing the time we had. The designathon was 3 days but we truly had one day to have everything completed and there were Submission Guidelines we had to follow. If we didn’t manage our time well then we’d struggle to finish creating a final prototype and have a meaningful solution. So setting up a timer for how long a task should take and dividing up the work helped significantly with utilizing our time properly. Another important choice we had to make was prioritizing certain tasks and having cut some out. As much as we wanted to do a Low-fidelity prototype and then do user testing and iterations base on feedback we knew that would take up a lot of our time so we focused a lot on our user research. This was our supplement to user testing and it gave reason to our design decisions made for the High-fielty prototype. One major challenge for our team was that 3/4 of us resided outside of Canada so researching and looking at the Rocketman app was very important to understanding their public transportation and how it functioned.

Next Steps

• Conduct user interviews and understand better how those with accessibility needs go about their day using the GTA public transportation. If given the time and capabilities to find someone to interview it could heavily shape the app by avoiding making assumptions.

• Conduct user testing and get feedback on the overall function of the app and do in-depth testing to see if the app actually meets accessibility needs.