Before starting into full research, I needed to pitch my project idea. This was done in tandem with some initial desk research found in the following pages of this blog. To begin planning my pitch, I decided on the following initial structure, which I have found to work well in the past.
After this, I started to script out parts of my pitch. While I like to talk casually and off-the-cuff, I’ve found scripting it out first really helps me learn what I need to say. I usually try to keep the scripting pretty quick, and actually I find having spelling mistakes or bad grammar in the script stops me from trying to emulate what I’ve written when saying it aloud.
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Metronet is an all in one, centralised platform for transport networks of any size to run, manage, and offer high quality digital services to their users.
Not going to drone about the translink app - we all know its bad
This was evident from some initial user surveys - unreliable, not intuitive, and just being unable to complete tasks
In the words of one user - it just sucks
All across the UK, cities and town have their own poor transport app for their local network, and they all tend to feature the same issues we see in translink
From my research, really only 5 cities at a push have what we can call good public transport digital services.
There is a clear difference in the quality of public transport digital services between the big cities that can afford to develop these systems, and those that can't
How do we reduce digital inequality among transport networks that offer digital services?
Now, at the moment most cities in the Uk are set up like this
The network passes data to their own app, whether thats developed by themselves, or an external team, the point is it's a singular app for their network
In the last few year, there has been a shift towards intermediary platforms, think trainline, first bus, or google maps
These are apps that the user engages with to retrieve data from network using whatever APIs are publicly available.
However, while these typically have good UX and design, their data is weaker as their not being fed it directly from the network and are having to rely on publicly available APIs
So how do we merge these into something good design, and reliable data, while being a viable option for networks?
Metronet would act as a 3rd part "direct" platform, which means while it wouldn't be developed and designed by the network, it would have their data fed directly in and maintained by the network.
Giving the user the best possible data supplied directly from the network
While also providing them with a great user experience informed from best practice examples
From my research, this is something that hasn't been done in the UK before, plenty of companies offer an off the shelf solution for network, but those still function as single apps - which is odd considering this is something that exists in other industries
All examples of 3rd part direct platforms,
these enable businesses and orginanisations that couldn't otherwise afford to offer their own digital services to do so, while still maintaining that companies identity within the platform
by taking this approach, metronet would be able to
offer a sce, where all networks are access by users through a single app, and maintained by network through the same platform. While still retaining a network individuality and identity
It would provide a more stable and reliable platform for both users and networks, with individual networks not having to rely on small and constrained development teams
It would support networks of all sizes, whether thats a city or region wide network like translink with thousands of journeys everyday, or a shuttlebus service that operates twice a day. Enabling those smaller networks digitally and giving users more transport options
And insights and shared resources for networks to improve their services, based not only on their own data but the data of other networks,
Over the next few weeks I'll be developing this concept further, focussing on research and user journeys developed and informed from interviews with individual users and hopefully network internal staff. This will feed the design side of the project beginning at the end of sem 1/start of 2
Thank you for listening and any questions.
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At this point, I was pretty happy with the content of the pitch and now could start thinking about the slide design.