Speaker’s Insight: Usability Matters and UX Research Techniques for Public Transit

As people who serve the transit market, it is our job to provide a valuable service to the general rider; we must be constantly thinking about how we can make every day travel easier for individuals. In essence, we must be striving to provide an experience that delights the transit rider. Best practices in user experience research and design can be applied to all aspects of the rider journey to ensure we are striving to meet this objective.

How can you apply user experience research and design principles as well as best practices to transit? At our upcoming 2016 Trapeze User Conference, in our session “Applying User Experience Principles to Transit” featuring representatives from one of our sponsors, Usability Matters, a user experience research and design firm, you’ll learn how agencies can think differently about UX to improve the overall rider experience through digital and industrial design paradigms.

We’ll focus on how you can think about the overall rider experience, how to uncover your riders’ pain points, and what cutting-edge techniques and concepts can be applied to drive exceptional results. What follows is a brief preview for what you can expect when attending this session.

How agencies can think differently about UX to improve overall rider experience

User experience is all about how easily a user/rider is able to find what they need when they need it through their interactions with you as an agency. It is also about how easily they can navigate your transit system. We’ll focus on some key things to consider when you are analyzing the overall user/rider experience.

New service design concepts from Usability Matters

An end-to-end user experience that truly delights the rider must go beyond simply designing and developing intuitive information systems. A transit agency must also consider how a rider interacts with the physical world. How can some of the new concepts in intuitive wayfinding or some of the techniques in service design be used to help the rider get where they need to go? We explore these questions and more.

Research techniques and tools to uncover usability issues

We will be going over several user research techniques and tools used to gather insights, collect data on riders’ behaviors and actions, and test the overall usability of a transit experience.

• User Surveys: Email surveys and intercept surveys are used to collect rider feedback on a specific set of questions.
• Contextual Inquiry: Interviews are conducted in the real environment with the rider, where a researcher watches the rider/user do their normal activities and discusses any artifacts they generate or use with them.
• Service Safari: An experiential field trip for service design and development teams to understand how services feel from the outside – as a rider.
• Usability Test: Used to evaluate the product by testing it on a sample set of users, by measuring the usability or ease-of-use of a specific object or set of objects.
• Focus Groups: An informal assembly of riders/users whose opinions are requested about a specific topic.
• Customer Feedback Logs: Access and scan through rider feedback logs to learn about issues brought up by users.

We hope you will join us for this session at the Trapeze UC! More importantly, we hope you join us for the Trapeze UC, April 3-6 in San Antonio, Texas. If you haven’t yet, what are you waiting for? Sign up today.