Displaying Transit Predictions

“Built on top of cow paths”

The legend goes that the city of Boston’s streets were built to follow cow paths—the informal paths that many people used to get from place to place before there were roads—rather than according to an organized plan. While the urban legend isn’t entirely true, it’s a great analogy for how many residents feel about how the transportation system communicates with its riders, even about something as critical as “When is the next bus or train coming?” It can feel haphazard, uncertain, and inefficient.

Big issues, limited resources

The department agreed that we needed to do a better job with communication. But how do we agree on what needs to be done, and help several busy product teams take on and prioritize the work? As a strategist and facilitator, I needed the innovation department’s leadership to agree to a set of priorities, and creating actionable next steps for individual contributors.

Research stewardship

We have a great deal of existing research on current practices, rider experience, and outside benchmarks. I synthesized our knowledge and gathered additional information to fill in the gaps.

• I gathered and analyzed photos of the “current state” of every way that riders might encounter a prediction about when a vehicle might arrive, creating a detailed “touchpoint library.”

• I reviewed an archive of rider feedback and coded it for comments, complaints, and compliments about predictions. I analyzed it for sentiment and connected it to the touchpoint it was referencing.

I distilled this research into a lexicon and grammar of "predictions display," which helped our leadership to understand the big picture.

Turning Opportunities into Action

I conducted small group workshops with individual contributors—members of the project teams that would eventually have to carry out any improvements to the system—to synthesize and contextualize the patterns that were showing up in analysis. In these sessions, we developed a list of “predictions tasks” and described what resources teams would need to accomplish them.

The User Experience lead and I worked to transfer these tasks to their respective teams, who have since implemented several of these changes.