An App to Make Riders Feel Safer on the CTA

What Efforts Has the CTA Made to Solve This Problem?

The city of Chicago recently invested in a 6-year, $8 billion initiative to “improve the commuting experience” of CTA riders, including:

• Continued “investment in technology” (e.g., CCTVs)
• Increased public education (e.g., anti-harassment campaigns)
• “Enhanced communications” with riders

Despite those efforts, however, overall ridership has declined 4.1% over last year. Our main objective was to identify reasons why this was occurring, and design a solution that directly addressed those reasons.

Ethnographic Observations + User Interviews

After collecting as much information as possible from the CTA, city press releases, and the media, we drafted up a topic map, which we used to formulate a (quick and dirty) set of questions. Although my partner and I both ride the CTA fairly regularly, we decided it was important to start off by observing common behaviors, issues, and potential pain points, framed under the context of safety. We spent the majority of a day observing (and riding) a few popular bus and “L” train stops/lines in the Chicago loop. We were also able to complete 6 guerrilla-style interviews (~5 min each) as a quick gauge of riders’ feelings and experiences in-transit. Since we anticipated riders to be in a hurry to catch their buses/trains, we crafted our questions to be very brief, and included a set of deeper follow-up questions in case any of our in-field interviewees had extra time (which, as we learned, they did not). The information we collected proved to be extremely helpful, however, and gave us more of a sense of direction to create a discussion guide for the 9 in-depth interviews we later conducted (30–40 min each; interviewees were screened by having any experience riding the CTA and were normally distributed by frequency of ridership).

Surveys

As the nation’s second-largest public transit system, CTA ridership encompasses a very large and diverse population. Because of this, we wanted to make sure we were collecting data from as representative of a sample as possible. We recruited as large of a sample as we could, given our time and budgetary constraints (n=50; same screening criteria as above). This helped further inform our decisions — and personally gave me some peace of mind that we weren’t just basing our designs exclusively off of those who were willing to chat with us (i.e., it potentially helped correct for some selection biases).

Competitive Analysis Pt. 1: How Have Other Cities Addressed This Issue?

Both Minneapolis and the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) supplemented their Metro Transit apps with a “Text for Safety” feature, enabling riders to seek help if they don’t feel safe making a call; however, depending on the circumstances, user may not have enough time or attention to send a descriptive text message. Users also must indicate their location using a dropdown menu, which fails to leverage the phone’s GPS features and adds an extra step in the user flow. St. Louis recently partnered with SafeTrek to offer an app that pings police with riders’ location if their finger releases an emergency button, but users must memorize a random PIN and enter it once they’re safe, which many have reported is difficult and unintuitive to use.

Takeaway: When designing for situations in which users’ cognitive abilities may be compromised due to panic, it’s vital that the steps to reach help are simple, streamlined, and free of complicated features/options.

Ideation, Sketching, & Iteration

After completing a design studio in which we rapidly ideated solutions, we mapped our ideas and categorized them into concepts to identify common patterns. Of these, 6 main concepts emerged. We then sketched each concept out and evaluated:

1. How well each addressed our design principles
2. How each seemed to balance business needs (increased ridership) with user needs (feeling safe, connected to help, and informed).

We decided to hone in on two main features we believed addressed our design principles most effectively:

1. Implement mobile call button options for reporting crime on the CTA
   • With real-time feedback from CTA staff/authorities
   • + instructions on what to do next
2. Create a way for riders to track and share their ride with others
   • With safety information of upcoming stops (staffing/security, etc.)
   • Also allowing for faster, more effective reporting

After prioritizing each concept (and their features), we conducted 3 rounds of usability testing, each with 3-4 participants, including our main persona. This lead to 4 total iterations of our initial prototype, mainly focusing of simplifying our user flows and making sure our call buttons’ interfaces were intuitive and effectively communicate their purpose.