This project involves the development of a Smart and Connected Bus Stop mobile application aimed at providing commuters with timely updates and information on public transport for their day-to-day commute. This project explores into various areas of design aspects taking on various use cases and inspirations from similar apps implemented in other smart cities such as Korea and Europe.
As Singapore envision herself as a smart city with constant evolution under its Smart Nation initiative, the public transport sector has seen vast transformation over the years. Intelligent transport planning has been the key with more MRT stations sprouting across the island and better fleet management as the Land Transport Authority (LTA) rolled out the bus contracting model roping in overseas bus operators into the bandwagon to provide commuters with more public transport options. The thirst for timely public transport information has always been the utmost priority for commuters constantly on the move. Our team has looked at case studies from smart cities such as Japan and South Korea and would like to incorporate the experience these apps in the overseas market gave to their users and how local transport mobile application providing commuters with the information they need can be improved to redefine their journey experience.
As part of finding out more about the current market of transport applications, the team conducted research into several applications, which are MyTransport, Grab, SGBusLeh and Naver Map.
As MyTransport was developed by LTA, affiliated with ST Engineering, it served as our main benchmark in comparison to the other applications. In comparison to the other applications, some of the main issues that we found were that it was cumbersome for users to navigate the application and that it did not have an appealing design.
In conclusion, we have found that users want applications that: