Case Study- Bus Booking Application

“We spend a lot of time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it.”

This beautiful piece of quote never fades away from my mind. As it is works like a never snoozing alarm which keeps on reminding me that I have to step into the shoes of those people who would use the product.

Introduction

A portal for Online Bus Ticket Booking. Yolobus is a multi-city travel bus for people. It allows users of all ages to have one, easy and straight-forward way of booking tickets.

Human-centered design is a philosophy, not a precise set of methods, but one that assumes that innovation should start by getting close to users and observing their activities. Therefore I preferred to opt for the design thinking process.

Here, is a brief about the stages of the Design Thinking cycle.

Empathize

When using a design thinking innovation process, the first step is to develop an empathetic understanding of the problem at hand.

This stage is all about understanding your users, like their behavior, character, and habit. I spoke with my peers and some common users and they told me about their troublesome and confusing ticket booking experience. Based on the interview method, I made a user Persona.

From this user persona, I understood the frustration of Tanmay Arora. He found train transportation cumbersome and hence the only solution for him is to travel by bus.

To empathize with Tanmay, I tried to pen down some important facts from this persona:

1. Tanmay always uses train.
2. For the alternate, Tanmay needs to use the bus.

Based on that fact, I need to figure out and differentiate the traits and habits of train & bus users. It is important for me to create a design with the best user experience. Like what is the facility that bus user likes? How do they find buses and buy tickets and many more.

So I conducted interviews with people from different backgrounds. After a series of questions, I got to the conclusion that there a plethora of problems that bus users face.

Problems

After analyzing the data from the interviews and surveys, I found these pain points from their answers.

1. There is no fixed schedule for the bus
2. The bus could be stuck in a traffic jam.
3. The bus usually overloads.
4. Can’t buy the ticket online for some routes.
5. People don't consider the bus as a safe transport.
6. No fixed timings for buses to stop on the terminals
7. Is there a washroom?
8. What about hygiene and sanitization?

How Might We

1. How might we make the user know about the bus schedule?
2. How might we make the bus not overload?
3. How might we make the booking process easier for the user?
4. How might we make the bus not stuck in a traffic jam?
5. How might we make the bus safe for the user?
6. How might we make the bus not stop for long hours at the terminal?
7. How might we make the user know the recommended destination?

well, now I have known the problem let's move to the Ideate section.

Ideation

Basically, almost all of the problems could be solved using online ticketing/booking services like Make My Trip, Redbus, etc.

But here is my solution to solve all the problems with a short explanation

1. The Interface should be user-friendly
   The user journey and experience should be hassle-free. I tried to inculcate this in my design, I did not include many features except search and booking.
2. Show the list of the available bus.
   For showing the available bus, I added a “label by best experience” function to show the bus with the highest rating to the lowest. So our user gets a recommendation for the best available bus. The list also shows the bus rating.
3. Show recommended destination whenever user type in the search field.
   This is important to give a recommendation to the users, so they don’t get confused.
4. Added a help/emergency button.
   This was highly required as in case of emergency, the bus could be tracked and also helps to connect with nearby police station and also notifies the head.
5. Added a feature of ‘Bus Captain’ who would be in charge of smooth passenger service.
6. Keeping track of passengers data and also the onboarding and deboarding of passengers in real-time.

I started with rough user journey flow charts before diving into prototyping

Prototyping

Honestly, I like this the most! I used Figma for this. Let’s get started!

Wireframe

I used digital wireframing with Figma. I just poured all ideas that popped in my head on the digital canvas. In this wireframing stage, I don’t need every detail to be drawn, I just need the layouts.

Visualize

After creating the wireframe, I tried to visualize it into high fidelity screen design.

Login and register.

I only provided for login method with a google account or by entering the mobile number.

Destination, Passenger, and Departure date

After logging, a user can search for buses by putting From and Destination. Then can select dates according to the relevance.

Search result

To make the user easy to find the departure time, I place the departure and arrival times on the left side. It is because our eyes tend to search from left to right. I put bus rating on the right side, this is to give information about the bus service qualities based on user rating.

Bus Details

The user can see the trip’s history and also the status of booked or canceled trips. One can also select the preferred seat through the seat icons and availability. A special feature has been added to book seats for women. As they can book seats which are reserved for them and are pink in color. The seats besides those seats would either be empty or booked for women only.

Few Layouts of Design