CalCompanionEnhancing the rider experience of the CalTrain through human-centered design
ROLE
Product design, User research
TIMELINE
5 weeks
TEAM
Lenique Louis, Sherry Yan, Tristan Hardy
TOOLS
Figma
PROBLEM
Since the pandemic, CalTrain ridership has been at an all time low. With only 30% of the riders they had pre-pandemic, my Design121 class was tasked to collaborate with the CalTrain to help :
Attract a wide demographic to ride the Caltrain
Increase ridership
Compete with an increasing number of options - from Lyft to Waymo to Uber Pool
My team and I worked together completing and maintaining weekly team activites, digital workspaces (figma), design reports, and a final presentation to create an insightful and user-focused solution.
USER RESEARCH
We went to the CalTrain station in Palo Alto to begin our user research and needfinding. We were not sure who we wanted our user group to focus on would be yet, so we talked with multiple people to see what their experience on the CalTrain was like.
An interesting quote we recieved was “ The CalTrain feels like an environment that could be used for speed dating’ where you can meet new/random people, and get to know them!” which ended up being a highlight of our design process.
This led us to another problem that we found important and connected to CalTrain ridership: loneliness. Majority of the riders were alone and isolated.***
POV
After learning about different user’s experiences, we synthesized them to create a user profile and POV. This guided our work for the rest of the project to make sure our prototypes were helping our user persona.
By creating a specific POV, we were able to ensure our ideas we came up with were targeting the issues we encountered.
An interesting quote we recieved was “ The CalTrain feels like an environment that could be used for speed dating’ where you can meet new/random people, and get to know them!” which ended up being a highlight of our design process.
PROTOTYPING
From our needfinding, synthesizing, and ideation we created 3 prototypes to address our need of helping riders feel more connected to others through the CalTrain.
We created a friend matching app, a speed dating app, and a mobile cafe. We tested these with real users on the CalTrain and got feedback. This led us to merge parts of each prototype to design our final idea
FINAL IDEA
We ended up creating a dating app that encouraged in person interaction while prioritizing safety. We had bounced around to many things but realized that our ideas were not coming from true user testing rather than what we believed users needed.
So, we went back to the CalTrain multiple times to get more interviews and test our new idea. The interactions we got were honestly so exciting. People believed in our app and we got to talk to so many new people.
Simply by going up to people who were waiting alone at the station we built a connection with them and ended up talking to them until their train came about things completely different from our topic.
This project was eye-opening to me not only in terms of human-centered design, but the larger issue of isolation and our lack of connection in the modern era.