Navigating Los Angeles is notoriously challenging. LA itself is a diverse and sprawling collections of mini-cities and cultures, and the spread of its urban spaces, coupled with frequent traffic and congestion, can make commuting or merely exploring extremely difficult. Public transportation can offer an accessible alternative, particularly beneficial for students. However, many UCLA students remain hesitant to fully adopt LA’s transit system, and UCLA student ridership is not has high as it could be. Through extensive user research, including surveys and in-depth scenario analyses, we explored students’ experiences to uncover why public transit has yet to fulfill its potential.
A Hypothetical
Take this hypothetical transit situation, totally not based on a true story. A certain student, we can call her Anna, has a job about 2 miles away from UCLA campus. Thankfully, the Rapid 12 Big Blue Bus runs perfectly from Ackerman Union at UCLA right down Westwood Boulevard to her work. All she has to do is catch the bus. Easy enough, right? Except for one minor hitch that Anna faces. On her mobile app, the bus is supposed to leave at 1:58PM. Anna’s class gets done at 1:50PM. Anna does that math and realizes that if it is a five minute walk from her class to the bus stop, she’ll still have about three minutes to spare. Only, the first time she did that, she arrived at 1:55PM and the bus was already gone. The next time, she left class early, arrived at 1:53PM and she saw the bus pulling away. The final time, she ran from class early, arrived at 1:50PM, stood outside the door waiting for the driver to open it, only for the driver to see her waiting and still pull away, a full 8 minutes earlier than scheduled. Anna’s frustrated by this unreliability, and feels like she cannot “hack” the transit system, which is unfortunate because of how convenient it is.
UCLA students want to explore Los Angeles more freely, but many avoid public transit due to perceived inconvenience, lack of control, and unfamiliarity with how to navigate the system to reach their destinations.
Our research began with an initial survey that garnered responses from over 80 UCLA students. The objective was to try to broadly understand student preferences and habits regarding public transit. We felt that we could better address the needs of the body as a whole if we had concrete and quantifiable data that perhaps drew to the same conclusions. Following the survey, we conducted detailed interviews with a diverse group of 12 participants, each bringing unique transportation experiences and perspectives. Being able to individually interview students allowed us to go even deeper on a certain topic, pain point, or experience in order to find where a potential solution would ease this concern. We were able to customize and tailor interviews to not only the responses of the interview, but their individual lived experience. This contrasted approach of broad but rigid surveying coupled with strict but flexible interviews helped us extract tangible insights that were monumental to our understanding of our users. We were able to categorize this information by grouping the types of transit users we witnessed in the process.