iMTA
2015, UX/UI DESIGN,
CASE STUDY AT PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL OF DESIGN
TEAM
Feng Yuan, UX/UI Designer
Han Ye, UX/UI Designer
Nadine Razzouk, Visual Design
Create a better MTA experience, with a specific concentration on people who have vision impairment.
DELIVERABLES
Concept Development
User Experience
Wireframes
Interface Design
iMTA is a project that I collaborated with Ye Han and Nadine Razzouk for Designing for Usability class at Parsons the New School for Design. The motivation came from our daily experience of taking the NYC subway to commute. As one of the world's oldest public transit systems, one of the most-used, and the one with the most stations, the MTA system is also famous for its complicated navigation in stations. iMTA is a mobile app to provide individuals who have vision impairment with a more efficient and friendly subway experience.
LINK
USER PERSONA
The MTA system should be accessible for everyone.
The MTA system should be accessible for everyone including the people with the vision impairment. Therefore, we sorted the target users into two groups: the users expecting an efficient and easy navigation experience in the MTA station and the users requiring an auditable navigation service in the MTA station.
PROBLEM FINDING
Interviewed individuals with visual impairment in order to understand their subway experience and develop the current subway service.
By contacting with New York State Office of Children and Family Service, Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (MOPD) and Director of Student Disability Services at Parsons, we were able to conduct a series of interviews with persons with vision disabilities.
In the interviews, we addressed a set of questions to fill our experience and knowledge gap:
How do you distinguish the direction of the station?
How do you find where the subway station is located?
How do you distinguish the sound of the turnstile?
When do you know whether or not you are entering/ failing?
If there’s one thing you can change to the subway station, what would you change?
By analyzing the participants' feedback, we sketched the user experience map to discover the pain point in their experience.
IDEATION AND USER FLOW
A mobile app that users can receive audio navigation in NYC subway station. This audio navigation concentrate on helping the user quickly and fluently enter/exit the station, take the right train and reach the right levels for possible transferring.