Seattle Public Transit Brand Redesign
From Seattle Public Transit To Emerald City Transit
As a project, in an advanced design class offered through the HCDE Department at The University of Washington, I redesigned Seattle Public Transit. This redesign started with user research, to understand the audience of Seattle Public Transit in order to design for the actual audience. Next, came the creation of six tasks that a user on Seattle Public Transit would complete. Three of these tasks would be designed for a mobile platform, and three of these tasks would be made for a kiosk interaction which would be located at a transit stop. Next, there were diagrams of user flows, to understand how the user would interact with the system while completing their tasks. Then, we created low fidelity wireframes to understand and test the layout of these interactions. Then, we created mood boards and picked a typographic hierarchy and a color scheme. Finally, we created high fidelity wireframes which showcased the fully designed interactions.
USER RESEARCH
The Seattle public transit system is an integral part of the community and has a multitude of considerations to design for. This user research will describe Seattle public transit’s audience, purpose, platforms, the current strength and weakness of the Seattle public transit system, and an assessment of a public transit system with a better design framework.
Audience:
The audience of the Seattle public transit system includes many groups of people. First, we have two sets of primary users. The first primary user is regular people living in Seattle who use primarily public transportation and walking to get around during their daily lives. -The people using the service tend to be those with a lower income, because public transportation is more affordable than owning a car, especially in a city setting. On top of the primary users though, we see a large number of stakeholders who are also affected by public transportation. Because this transit system is funded by the government, that means that our taxes partially go towards paying for this system. So, anyone who pays taxes is going to be a stakeholder in the system. A few special considerations to account for when considering the audience of public transit is to remember the edge case users. There are a fair number of disabled people who are in chairs or who have walkers that take the bus. We also have homeless people riding the bus occasionally because it is the cheapest and warmest thing to do in the cold Seattle winters. The audience of public transit really does tend to be people who are disadvantaged.
Purpose:
The purpose of the Seattle public transit system is to help people get around the city/county. This is a service available to many people for a fairly low cost all things considered, especially when you consider how expensive it is to own a car in the city (spending 100+ dollars a month for parking alone is just not affordable!) . If I wanted this brief to be like 6 pages long, I would go on a rant about how public transportation should be free, but I will digress. Secondary purposes for this transit system include helping alleviate traffic congestion by putting more people in one vehicle and reducing the number of cars on the road. This is also a handy service for people who are not living in Seattle but are in fact visiting Seattle as they travel between all of the attractions in the area.
Platforms:
The Seattle public transit system has a couple of systems for communicating their routes and services. Their biggest communication platform is the train stations and bus stops. At these stops, there is a lot of information about routes and the bus system. These stops tend to have pamphlets about the route schedule as well as maps of the route. These stations also occasionally include machines where you can buy single use tickets, as well as refill your Orca card. Along with the in person stations and stops, the Seattle public transit system also has their information listed online both through links in the Seattle government website to all of the independent sites of the transit systems with information about the company and the transit schedules. There are also a couple of third party apps like one bus away that provide information for the busses in real time, but as far as an app provided by the transit authorities, there isn’t a functional one.
Seattle Transit System Assessment:
The biggest issue there seems to be with the Seattle public transit system seems to be the distinct lack of cohesion between the multitude of systems in place for public transportation. The main two are Link Light Rail and King County Metro. But there are a number of other smaller transit authorities including but not limited to: community transit, the monorail, and water taxis. All of these systems seem to run on the Orca card, but they are managed by a large number of I have always been very confused as to why the Light Rail and the King County Metro Bus system have very different aesthetics. The color for king county metro is green yellow and red, which is an unappealing color combo. While link uses a white and blue color scheme. Community transit, another branch also follows the blue and white color scheme. The light rails main flaw is that the tap on tap off system is kind of a pain to use and the range of the light rail is very limited, but it is being expanded. The buses have a very difficult payment system where you only need to tap on. There are very few bus stops with kiosks to refill the clipper card or buy tickets.
I don’t love Seattle public transportation. I used it freshman year and had some questionable experiences. But now I have a car in Seattle so I don’t really ever use transit unless I am going from the U district to downtown. I understand the system. I would change the system so that both king county metro and link light rail have a consistent theme, look and combined website. I would also make the west lake station more easily understood. When you take a bus out of Westlake it is from the same place you take the light rail. It is very confusing and should be reworked so that the markings are more clear and more easily understood and identified.
When you search King County Metro in the App store, there is one app for purchasing tickets and it gets very poor reviews, and only has about 150 reviews, so clearly it isn’t well integrated into the system.
THE BRAND BOOK
Although you can download the final brand book here, it is also imbedded into the article above. This brand book shows the steps of the entire design process, from creating a mood board and picking color schemes and typographic systems, to diagraming user flows and creating low and high fidelity wireframes for 3 interactions on a mobile device and 3 interactions on a kiosk system.
REFLETION
The most substantial take away from I went through a few iterations of mood boards, as the foundation for the design process, before I settled on a theme that inspired me. To explore the development of the new brand aesthetic for Emerald City Transit’s, let’s take a look at the three iterations of mood boards for this redesign project.
The first theme that I came up with for the redesign of Seattle Public Transit, was “Calm for Commuters.” This idea stemmed from wanting to make people’s commute easier, but I was feeling uninspired by the concept of calm for commuter. I did however really enjoy the pink sunset vibes from this mood board.
The second iteration of the mood board is where we see the introduction of “Emerald City Transit.” I don’t even remember how it happen, but something got me thinking about Wicked, and I felt inspired. I wanted to add some fairytale whimsy to the users commute. But the monochromatic theme in green seemed a bit aggressive to me.
The final iteration of the mood board is a culmination of the first two mood boards. I took the pink accents from the calm for commuting mood board and combined it with monochromatic green scheme from my first iteration of the Emerald City Transit mood board. All things considered, the final product from this public transit redesign would probably not be incredible for a public transit system because it is so whimsical and cities prefer a more clean, clear cut design.
