BusLA
A travel website to encourage and guide UCLA students to explore different parts of Los Angeles
BACKGROUND
What makes a city special? You really won't truly know until you explore the city for yourself and take on new experiences. BusLA.me was built in the pre-Uber days to encourage UCLA students to explore LA by public transportation. Since its launch, BusLA.me has given hundreds of students knowledge of places to explore throughout the city and how to get there without a car.
CHALLENGE
During the first two years at UCLA many students stated that on the weekends they stayed on campus or only traveled to the same places while on the same bus route as they faced transportation limitations & lacked knowledge of places to visit.
How might we create a website that lets students not only discover new things to do in LA, but also easily navigate to them?
TEAM
The team consisted of myself as the designer and content curator, and a developer.
Solution
BusLA was designed to allow users to visually view bus routes from UCLA and locations they lead to, as well as where places of interest were clustered.
Users could also filter the view by specific bus route, activity type (denoted by color & symbol), and budget.
Each place contains details including hours, link to more details, and the ability to directly map bus routes from UCLA to the activity viewed.
Approach
Evaluate Current State
Before starting I sought to understand how students currently find new places to explore as well as hind their way around the city.
Students currently sift through multiple sites and keeping track of what's interesting. Most sites are geared towards tourists and don't include local spots or places that fit your typical college student's interests, accessibility, and budget.
After looking up each event, finding out directions as well as open hours, prices, and other details are done on Google. Though Google is pretty reliable, students feel burdened when continually looking up information.
Quick Feedback
I would draw paper sketches and get quick feedback from my two roommates - one on what he felt was useful as a student, the other who was the developer working on the project. This was extremely helpful in making decisions in terms of which design to pursue.
BusLA Designs
Through 4 design sprints, we came up with a final prototype for a mobile & desktop experience.
Homepage
The homepage is a map of LA with all bus routes that go near UCLA. Places that are near these routes are then represented with a pin corresponding to the type of place/activity it is.
Explore by Bus Route
Users can select a single bus route and see all the activities along the path, allowing for exploration of new activities along a familiar route.
Filters
Through interviews, we found that knowing the type of place and cost was important, so we created corresponding filters.
Preview Places
Selecting a pin brings up a summary of the place with high level details to help users decide whether or not to view more information.
Details & List View
Users can view more details about each place & activity, with links leading to official websites and Google Maps. This will be in a list view so users can easily keep exploring new place.
Google Maps Route
To get real time directions, users can click on a maps link and Google Maps will open up in a new tab with the bus route automatically created with UCLA as the starting point.
Project Learnings
Takeaways from this process
Work Close with Developers
Having quick feedback loops was extremely important to making decisions and ensuring that the project could be completed by the end of 3 months. I learned a lot about what designs were low vs high lift and made me a much more confident in the designs.
Do What You Care About
Because exploration was so core to who I was, working on this project was fun and rewarding. Though it was a lot of work to gather everything, it was gratifying to hear others talk about finding news places because of BusLA.