User Testing

To ensure our redesigns were hitting their mark, we produced a minimum viable product (MVP) as quickly as possible. We mapped a common user flow, typed out some questions, stitched our wireframes together, and brought a working Marvel prototype to MARTA stations and onto the train.

Jeremy conducting some user testing with regular MARTA riders (we asked the little girl first but she wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers)

We asked 6 riders to find a specific stop, find when their train was arriving, and find a specific bus route. They accomplished these in our redesigned app, then did the same tasks in the current MARTA app.

Rather than just relying on user’s feedback, we kept our eyes glued to the screen the whole time. Observation gave us some really valuable insight on where different users expect to be able to tap or otherwise interact to navigate.

Conducting user testing early on in the hackathon gave us a huge advantage. We were able to identify issues with the app and focus in on what riders found useful.

User testing at Five Points Station

One example of an easy fix was our bus route summary screen. Following material design guidelines, we used a tab bar to organize information about route schedules. In testing we realized that some users were tapping some plain-text that said “Weekdays” to view the weekday schedule instead of following our intended behaviour — tapping on the “Weekdays” tab in the tab bar.

Rather than corral users into following our intended paths, we simply added tapping the plain-text as another easy way to navigate between the tabs.