busLA.me
A travel website that encourages and guides UCLA students to explore different parts of Los Angeles
My first web design project of a site which allows students to discover new parts of LA while providing a means for them to travel there through public transportation. We saw hundreds of monthly users and the site was featured in the school paper.
CONTRIBUTIONS
End to end designs
Content creation
Design–engineering collaboration
Prioritization of features to include in the MVP
Quick feedback & iteration loops with users
Role
Designer & Product manager
Team
1 designer/PM
1 engineer
Timeline
June - July 2014
Problem
Why buses?
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.
Opportunity gap
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.
Students currently sift through multiple sites and keeping track of what's interesting. The process of researching, finding directions, and figuring out other details leaves students overwhelmed and less likely to explore.
Sifting through multiple resources to discover places to explore
Solution
Design challenge
How might we create a website that lets students not only discover new things to do in LA, but also easily navigate to them?
I worked with my roommate at the time who was a CS major to tackle this challenge, with my role in the design, content creation, and management, and he worked on the technical execution.
Solution overview
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.
Home page
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.
View available bus routes and places of interest
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.
View points of interest along a specific bus route
Quickly preview
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.
Preview each point of interest without leaving the main page
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.
View more details and browse in a list view
Link to Google maps
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.
Google maps navigation for real time directions
Reflections
Developer collaboration
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.
Chase your core curiosities
Because exploration is so core to who I am, 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.