BART Case Study

Case Study • 10 min

BART Mobile App

A companion app to the Bay Area Rapid Transit experience, providing users with real-time navigation, contactless payment options, and a community forum for information.

Duration: Aug 2020 (1 month)
Role: Interaction/Visual Designer, UX Researcher
Collaborators: Tiffany Vo

Defining the Problem

How might we reimagine the BART to promote a safe, clean, and efficient customer experience for both new and regular commuters?

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is a rapid transit system that provides affordable and accessible public transportation to a vast majority of the denizens residing in San Francisco/Bay Area in California. As COVID-19 continuously alters our perception of public facilities and services, we wanted to envision a product that rebuilds the trust between the community and public transportation.

With this objective in mind, we formulated the problem statement above to guide our design processes.

Core Experiences

With a commuter-first mentality, we centralized our efforts on reimagining BART’s mobile presence. Complementing BART’s mission to connect communities with seamless mobility, our mobile application provides commuters with detailed trip navigation, contactless forms of payment, and a community-based notification system. Our vision of the BART mobile application aims to make commuting effortless for everyone, everywhere.

Trip Planner and Navigation

View upcoming BART times and plan your trip accordingly. The detailed trip view provides transparency and information through all stages of your route, from start to end.

Contactless Payment: Clipper Card

With hygiene in mind, we developed a new form of contactless payment utilizing E-tickets and digital Clipper Cards.

Pair your physical Clipper card to your digital wallet and say hello to a reimagined, hygiene-oriented BART experience.

Contactless Payment: E-Ticket

Consumers without Clipper Cards can still embrace a contactless BART experience through the introduction of E-Tickets.

Avoid direct contact with kiosks and purchase one-way or roundtrip tickets directly from the app.

Reloading Anytime, Anywhere

With consumer convenience in mind, we have introduced a new reload feature that allows users to reload their Clipper cards directly through the mobile app.

Alerts: For Commuters, By Commuters

BART’s mission is to connect Bay Area communities with seamless mobility and our mission is to connect communities with one another.

To promote connectivity, safety, and awareness amongst commuters, we implemented a user-based alert system that serves as a hub for all BART-related information.

Update Your Community

Providing users with the power to inform and connect with their community.

Research

In our research, we conducted 10 user interviews, gathered 30 user responses from surveys, and analyzed existing public transportation products as a form of competitive analysis.

After synthesizing our research, we utilized affinity mapping to help us visualize the data gathered and deduced 3 key insights:

User Personas

We then consolidated the insights into two main personas, with the primary persona being the most common user type out of the ones we interviewed.

Journey Mapping

To empathize with our primary persona’s overall BART experience, we utilized journey mapping to help us better understand and visualize his pain points throughout his regular commute.

Ideation & Low-Fidelity Prototyping

With ideas brewing, we ideated individually and then collaboratively decided on the potential features that we wanted to explore.

We proceeded to sketch out low-fidelity prototypes of the core screens. During this stage, we focused primarily on screen composition and element placement.

Mid-Fidelity Prototyping

After finalizing our wireframes, we transitioned to mid-fidelity prototypes and began fleshing out aesthetic elements. We designed multiple iterations with flow in mind, hoping to gather valuable feedback during user testing about how each screen interacted with one another.

User Testing / Feedback

Using our mid-fidelity prototypes, we conducted 6 user tests on both frequent and inexperienced bart users.