NJ Transit App Redesign
Easier way to getting around.
TIMELINE
4 Weeks
ROLE
UX/UI Design, UX Research
TEAM
2 UX Designers
From app reviews to the voices of people around me, there have been many complaints made about the NJ Transit app from mainly the bus riders. As a fellow NJ Transit bus rider myself, I've also had my fair share of challenges understanding how to work the app.
Partnering up with another UX designer, we've decided to work on improving the app under a time constraint (4 weeks).
Understanding that there is a general consensus amongst NJ Transit bus riders that the app is difficult to use, we wanted to dig deeper into the aspects of the app that proved to be difficult to use. From the interview and survey responses we've received, we were able to pinpoint 2 main issues:
When buying a bus ticket through the Route & Zone option, people have trouble figuring out how many zones are needed for their trip. Unless the person was a frequent bus rider, most people found it difficult wrapping their heads around the concept of "zones."
It's also not the easiest figuring out which route is needed to take for the journey ahead. Most people have pointed out that they have to use outside resources (Google maps, asking around, etc.) to see which route would be best for them.
While there is the option of finding a possible bus route by searching through the Origin and Destination option under Buy Tickets, it requires the user to already know the name of the station or stop beforehand.
We created 2 personas: one who uses the NJ Transit app often and one who is pretty new to the app.
My partner and I wanted to see what set apart other "good" public transit ticketing apps compared to the NJ Transit app.
While we've observed the user flows to be much simpler for the other apps, we had also come to notice that the NJ Transit app had no choice but to be different from other transit ticketing apps for 2 main reasons:
We concluded that what worked for other ticketing apps may not work as a one-size-fits-all solution for the NJ Transit app.
Specifically, we wanted to focus on improving the user flow for buying bus tickets.
We had 3 goals to keep in mind when creating the wireframes:
We conducted user testing with 4 participants, 3 of whom were already familiar with using the NJ Transit app.
On the tickets page, we've gotten feedback that the plus button wasn't exactly the most obvious. We wanted to make it clearer that the button was an option to buy a ticket.
All of our participants seemed to be confused about the difference between the trip planner and the map search option when buying bus tickets. My partner and I concluded that they were both serving similar purposes (which was finding the best route for your trip), so we decided to have it come together as one.
To make it easier for users to quickly purchase tickets that they often buy on a regular basis, we made it possible to repurchase either a used ticket under the tickets tab or a favorited ticket under the favorites section on the home screen by clicking on the bright blue REPURCHASE link.
