collecting data
To understand the issues that riders have the team visited the light rail stations and conducted observational and interview research. Observational data was collected at the Light Rail station watching people go about buying tickets, studying bus maps, and navigating through the station. Interviews were conducted with Light Rail riders, Security Guards, and representatives of the Orca card system that had set up an informational tent for the two weeks following the opening of the new station.
inside my head
This observational data was not the most insightful. The light rail stations are all fairly new, as is the light rail itself. Orca cards have a great user interface, effectively eliminating any time consumption issues for regular commuters. I could not personally find any issues with this system through observation, so I decided to ask commuters in quick informal interviews. I found that of nine commuters I interviewed, eight had no complaints, while one's only complaint was that scanning made them break their pace. Our team was going to need to look elsewhere for a problem to solve.
Observational Notes
affinity diagramming
The team collected 30 pages of data, which then were converted data findings to sticky notes for affinity diagramming. The information problems were then sorted into groups such as navigation, pain points, and goals. With the data organized into important themes and groups, which were then translated to personas.
inside my head
I noted that pain points in the light rail were often due to lack of effort on the passengers part, which intrigued me. I conducted a couple interviews after the diagramming. One student simply referred to the map on the wall noting, "When I see all that text and color, my brain just shuts down". This lead me to believe we needed more testing, to discover what aspect of the map lead to the student's brain "shutting down". The colors, shape or amount of text, or some combination could lead to this action. Unfortunately, the time schedule of this project during this quarter did not allow for much flexibility in the user research timeline.
Affinity Diagrams