Rider Alert Optimization

Company

RideKC is the public transportation system in the Kansas City metro area, serving over 12 million riders per year.

Users

Riders of the Kansas City metro area’s streetcars, buses, paratransit, bike share, and mico transit services.

Challenge

Public transit serves a diverse population that requires timely and accessible service communication.

Role

The transit authority’s sole end-to-end product designer working as the project lead working under the Director of Planning.

Goal
Allow riders to select services that are relevant to them and receive notifications via a communication channel of their choice.

Discovery

Process Audit

Our current channels of communication were embarrassingly limited and have numerous pitfalls including excessive delays, environmental impact, production and employee time/costs, and ultimately not being received in time or at all.

I reviewed the process for sending and receiving various alerts from the point of view for both the transit authority employees and the transit riders. This allowed me to identify significant pain points for both.

Pain Points Identified
  • Alerts aren’t in the right employees hands at the right time
  • Messaging important information is a cumbersome process
  • Uninformed riders are dealing with service-related issues
User Needs

I utilized existing survey data but also conducted user interviews for the two user types to understand and empathize with their needs and establish project goals.

Transit Riders

Rider alert communications through several outputs that can be tailored by them, and sent as soon as possible to give them time to replan their trips if needed so they have minimal impact to their schedule.

Transit Employees

A quick way to send pertinent information to the riders with as few handoffs from the original source of details as possible during all service operational hours. Assistance in messaging for non-communications employees.

Design

Crafting the Platform

With a cross-functional team, I established a budget, researched other transit agency solutions, discussed feasibility of potential options, and interviewed a handful of integration partners with software we could build on.

We selected Alert Media, which met all our criteria and offered some great benefits that fit our needs.

Information Architecture

With the goal of sending out targeted alerts as soon as possible with as little handoff as possible, we needed to expand this service to the entire region of transit service providers (6) that make up the RideKC brand.

I structured each service type as groups that can receive messages from brand-wide down to route-specific.

I then coordinated with each organization to provide training and establish specified messaging access for each.

Visual Design

The way we communicate this new service needed to fit into the existing RideKC brand to be easily recognizable to riders.

I created a logo and set of visuals to explain the service in a simple, trustworthy way.

I built a 3 month campaign to market this new service with our existing channels as well as public outreach.

Facilitating Subscriptions

Web form: I designed a simple, accessible web form for riders to select their routes to subscribe to. This page could be returned to any time to update the subscription.

Text code: Riders could text a specific code assigned to each route to subscribe.

Phone call: The Regional Call Center could both recommend the subscription service to riders and add subscribers if they agree.

Creating Notifications

After crafting message templates, design efforts were pretty minimal.

I worked with the Alert Media team to build design templates for the web form and the email notification.

Once an alert was published, riders would receive this message in whichever format they subscribed to.

Conclusion

Service in Action

With major upcoming service changes, I was able to speak with hundreds of riders about the new alert service and whether it fit their needs. For maybe the first time, I received no negative feedback about a RideKC service.

In addition to feedback during outreach events, I also overheard riders on vehicles recommending to other riders the alert service as the best way to be in the know.

Making Adjustments

After implementation, we were running into a lot of issues receiving text requests to subscribe to a group but the code was not going through because it was case sensitive. We were able to remove the case sensitivity and alleviate 90% of missed requests going forward.

Measuring Success

We estimated about 1,000 subscribers within a year of launching and were right on target, with steady growth month to month.

While we heavily marketed the service in the first 3 months of the launch, growth remained steady for the following 9 months, which confirms the usability and usefulness of the service.