Unlocking Urban Mobility

Bridgeable was contracted by MaRS to lay the foundation for The Future of Urban Mobility project. Focusing on Vaughan commuters and stakeholders, the 2017 Designership was challenged to prototype shared mobility solutions that would divert suburban commuters from single occupancy vehicles.

My Role

As a design researcher on a team of four interns, my role was to paint an accurate picture of the current commuting experience and identify areas for maximum impact.

In more specific terms, I:

• Generated key questions tailored to each of the exploratory, collaborative, and validation phases of the project 

• Crafted detailed interview and facilitation guides

• Conducted, filmed, and edited ethnographic interviews and prototype validation sessions in collaboration with other team members

• Planned and executed guerrilla prototype testing

• Analyzed qualitative data and distilled it into actionable design principles

• Communicated research insights at varying levels of complexity to clients, stakeholders, and workshop participants

Approach

Improving metropolitan transit is an enormous design challenge to tackle in just under four months. To create impactful service concepts that would succeed where many others had failed, we would need to ground our designs in qualitative, human-centred research, and place them in front of stakeholders and commuters at each level of fidelity for adjustment and iteration.

Project Pivot

Our research with commuters showed two major pain points throughout their journey: the constant parking struggle at GO stations and the difficulty of making rerouting decisions once a delay occurs. 

Our initial concept focused on the former; lowering parking demand had the highest potential for impact, and aligned with stakeholder priorities and resources. However, as we tested the concept against our research insights and behaviour profiles, it became clear that the two pain points identified earlier were deeply interconnected, and that we could not fully solve one problem without solving the other. 

In the end we produced three prototypes that satisfied the following principles:   

• Provide multiple backup options through each leg of the journey to reach the level of reliability commuters need in order to leave their cars at home

• Help commuters make efficient, informed decisions when choosing which option is right for them

Pulling all of the major research insights through to the end of the prototyping phase helped us see the shortcomings of a single solution and see connections that would have been lost had we jettisoned our initial data.

Outcomes

By the end of the Designership we had spoken to over 80 commuters, conducted four stakeholder workshops, and produced three video prototypes and one app prototype. 

We ensured that our research insights would endure by framing our prototypes with two sets of rules. Viewed together, our prototypes demonstrated systems-level design principles. Individually, each prototype embodied make-or-break recommendations that spoke to key features essential to that prototype’s success. As the Future of Urban Mobility Project continues, each set of rules will be carried through to pilots generated by further stakeholder collaboration. 

What I loved about this project

Conducting research only at the outset of a project often means that research participants only have one opportunity for involvement, and have no idea what happened as a result of their contributions. On this project we were able to engage with several of the same participants through multiple research phases and it was wonderful to see their excitement in witnessing their own input come to life with increasing fidelity. Rather than just mining them for data, we were able to collaborate with participants and show them the results of their contributions.