Seattle Greater Good Challenge

This volunteer project was part of the Seattle Social Good Series presented by the Seattle Chapter of IxDA. It ran over several monthly IxDA events, finishing with a hackathon that brought the teams together to build their final solutions and present them to the whole group and to stakeholders.

Our team was tasked with looking into possible solutions for an SDOT initiative that was trying to resolve a rather large demographic (35% +/-) of people in Seattle that don't or can't utilize technology, such as cell phones or computers, to maximize their public transportation experience.

The brief ruled out the obvious answer. Whatever we proposed had to work for someone with no smartphone, so the research had to start with the people themselves rather than with a screen.

Research for this project included brainstorming sessions between group members. We researched all the various types of individuals that could benefit from possible onsite tech solutions. We also looked into similar solutions that other cities had invested in.

We also ran guerrilla research, using a series of questions based off our brainstorm sessions. We then traveled out to several bus and tram stops that SDOT had told us they had interest in for this study. At each location we spent time talking to as many users as would talk to us. We gathered their answers, organized them into buckets and pulled as many insights as we could from them.

We ran through many possible solutions and came down to what we felt were three strong solutions of varying degrees of complexity using the concept of Walk, Run, and Jump.

In-person outreach (Walk). A low-cost solution: educating and informing people through various forms of local outreach, such as setting up official SDOT tables at farmers markets or other locations of interest outside of Seattle to reach patrons who might not have access to technology but would gather for other reasons.

Informative signage on buses (Run). This solution would provide informational services to riders who were already on a bus but did not have technology to help navigate to their destination. This solution would see installation of video screens and/or informative static posters into the unused overhead spaces on buses that would clearly communicate the stops that bus will make, seeing stops before and after, and also the time between each stop. To increase accessibility with non-English speaking users the signs would attempt a combination of universal iconography and words.

SDOT kiosks (Jump). Our two SDOT representatives discussed this as a possible idea during our first meet up. Our group then took the idea and iterated on it further until we had a fairly actionable solution. Initial SDOT information kiosks would be set up at bus stops and train stations in the locations that SDOT had flagged as areas of interest. The Kiosk would provide anyone with the same navigational and informative services that many access via their smart phones.

Someone would walk up to one of these friendly and inviting kiosks, interact with it in the language they are most comfortable using, enter a desired destination and the Kiosk would print out a small and easy to understand sheet / card with directions that the user could take with them. Alternatively, the user could have the directions sent to their mobile phone as a text message.

I prototyped the information screens that would be installed on the buses, and what they'd show riders.

The work produced three solution directions of increasing ambition (in-person outreach, on-bus signage, and multilingual SDOT kiosks), along with prototypes for the on-bus information displays.