Motivation
This CSCI 5115 course project is an attempt to redesign the existing metrotransit website. Route search is a popular and frequently used tool in a public transit company’s website. The current metrotransit website has several flaws that make it difficult to use. Hence, we have redesigned the route search portion of the metrotransit website.
Current MetroTransit.org site
Metrotransit.org is used by the people to plan travel by the public transit system of Minneapolis. Many students and staff at the University make use of this transit system. Our user visits revealed that the current metrotransit website is not well designed and user friendly. Important shortcomings in the metrotransit website include lack of simple and natural dialogue, poor error handling, lack of graphical representation of the route, necessity to remember lengthy addresses, difficult error recovery. Our redesign efforts address many of these concerns.
MetroTransit redesigned
Our redesign efforts address many of the concerns listed above.
The prototype now supports:
- Finding the route between two Minneapolis locations served by MetroTransit, with the option of breaking the journey several times.
- A map that displays the route.
- Suggestions to correct an incorrect/incomplete address.
- Addition of addresses to a ‘favorites list’.
- History that contains all recently searched routes.
Below are snapshots of the redesigned interface:
A retrospective
Our group benefited from choosing to redesign an existing website because it gave us an opportunity to evaluate an existing interface and learn from its shortcomings. It was fairly simple to find users for this common application that would be used every day.
Our advice to groups considering similar projects:
- Evaluate available technologies thoroughly while working on the project proposal.
- Begin development early.
- And do not accidentally overlook anything in the project guide every week; else a ‘check-minus’!