For a project in the Human Centered Design & Engineering course on User-Centered Design, a team of students explored the question: "How can information empower Metro King County bus commuters?" Their proposed solution, The Bus Beacon, aims to improve the bus commuting experience by centralizing information at the shared place all bus users must visit: the bus stop.

 

Seattle's bus commuters rely on various sources for bus arrival information, including official schedules, online maps, and transit apps. Recognizing the fragmented nature of these sources and the uncertainty they create for new bus users, a team of HCDE students envisioned a solution providing localized, accessible, real-time information directly at the bus stop.

The Bus Beacon

 

The Bus Beacon is an innovative redesign of the bus stop. It features lighted poles that are color-coded to specific routes and display arrival information for each route. The top third of the beacon visually tracks the arrival of the next bus, illuminating towards the top and playing a chime when buses arrive. An embedded display provides arrival times, a QR code for additional route information, and a refreshable braille interface for blind users. 

The students also designed a companion smartphone widget that tracks bus arrival times at specified stops. The widget, designed with the same visual language as the physical pole, allows users to view their most frequented bus routes at a glance.

"Our team was unique in that most of us had some background in the built environments, including architecture, urban design, and interior design, so we were used to taking concepts from idea through full implementation and considering things that make a project feasible," said Michelle Northfield, then a student in HCDE's Certificate in User-Centered Design and now an incoming master's student. 
 

Understanding commuter needs

To understand bus commuter pain points, the team conducted informal surveys using a tear-apart poster at bus stops around Seattle, that ask, "How was the bus today?" with options: bad, okay, great. The poster included a QR code for a secondary survey with optional questions for riders to share more detailed feedback.

"We were learning the user-centered design process in class as we were working on this project, so we were following the steps of defining the problem, analyzing research, ideating, prototyping, and testing," described Northfield. "Our instructors encouraged us to think very big and then narrow our scope based on our user surveys. With each decision, they asked, 'what kind of data do you have to support that? What are the users saying?' Continually returning to our user feedback helped us make sure we were heading in the right direction."
 

Refining the scope

Based on their primary research, questions emerged around how bus commuters prefer to receive information. The team conducted a follow-up survey with some of the initial participants and found that people preferred pulling information rather than receiving push notifications -- they would rather receive information passively as they approached the bus stop. 

Additional feedback from surveys highlighted the importance of accessibility for diverse needs. "At every stage, we were thinking about ways to make our design more accessible," said Northfield. “With public transit, we know every element needs to be fully accessible to everyone. We wanted to go beyond the basics to ensure accessibility was one of the biggest guiding values in our project.” The team incorporated a refreshable braille display after learning about the technology in one of the course readings, and they designed the information display to be at a height that meets ADA requirements for a person using a wheelchair.

Testing a solution

The most influential decision in informing the final design was to make it accessible to people without smartphones. Whether a person does not have a phone, has a disability, or prefers an alternative method of receiving information, the physical pole design should meet their needs.

The team created full-scale paper prototypes and conducted usability tests of two different display options. Participants were given various scenarios, and their interactions and feedback were observed to refine the design further. 

Usability tests informed the team's decision to integrate both a visual countdown cue (a dotted line circle) alongside an HH:MM time format, and clarify the expected result when someone scans the QR code.

"We got a lot of feedback during our testing and final showcase from people who were like, 'I would totally use this. Why don't we have this?' So that feels like we were able to meet our goal in designing a concept for something that could meet real needs for Seattle bus commuters," said Northfield.

View a video from the students about the Bus Beacon Below. For more information about this project, contact HCDE Master's student Michelle Northfield at mmnorth@uw.edu.