We’re excited to have Ljuba Miljkovic join Adaptive Path in just a couple weeks. Ljuba is a recent grad of the UC Berkeley School of Information (I School). His master’s thesis was the design and development of an iPhone app for public transit riders which won an award for outstanding achievement by the university.

I sat down with Ljuba over a month ago when he was in the final thrusts of the project. At the time he had high fidelity sketches and a working prototype. We talked about where the idea for this app came from and his approach to designing it.

Background

Ljuba didn’t start off with aspirations to be a designer. His bachelor’s degree is in environmental science. During studies he found joy in visualizing and presenting the data that science provides. With this new found interest he sought out further education in design and enrolled in the I School.

Ljuba garnered some attention in 2009 when the results of a class project made the rounds on IxDA lists and the rest of the web. Along with a fellow classmate he prototyped a new ticket purchase kiosk interface for the San Francisco region’s train service, BART. You can play with the prototype online. Anyone familiar with the out-of-date kiosks found in BART will surely find the redesign to be a drastic improvement.

“People use transit to get around, but nobody really loves it.”

Before working on the BART kiosk redesign Ljuba was not a transit geek. The project actually wasn’t his idea, it came from his classmate. Now however, you can tell that he’s is an unabashed supporter of public transit and sees that experience designers and technologists have an opportunity to improve it, getting more people out of cars and onto buses and trains.

Definition

When coming up with his master’s thesis, Ljuba found that he had a personal need to fill when it came to using public transit. He also had a hunch that others shared this need. Following a rigorous user centered design process he interviewed over a dozen transit users over the phone and in person throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Patterns began to emerge pointing to a sense of anxiety when using public transit. There is a lack of control inherent in traveling by bus and train. What if a mobile app could reduce missed trains and late arrivals, thus reducing rider anxiety?

The app quickly became focused on four primary tasks:

1. Find out when the next bus or train is going to arrive here.
2. Find out when I will arrive at my destination.
3. Alert me if I should pick up the pace so as to not miss the train or bus.
4. Help me plan a trip.

Some of these tasks rely heavily on gathering real-time data from the transit operators. Luckily, a PhD student in Cal’s Civil Engineering department was already working on that problem. Jerry Jariyasunant was responsible for the real-time trip planning API (which is planned for the next major release later this summer). The two were able to setup a good deal: they exchanged skills and insights about users for access and tools.

Interaction Design

Armed with a good understanding of user needs, Ljuba spent two weeks paper prototyping the major features. These sketches helped to focus the app on the core interactions needed to solve each primary task.

He found that counting the taps to complete a task was critical. The target user of this app is someone on-the-go, walking towards the train who needs quick access to information.

“The most obvious solutions can take so much time to find.”

Next he began to mock up higher fidelity screen designs and load them into Keynote. This allowed the testing of an interactive prototype with friends and with riders waiting at the train station.

Little problems like prompting the user about “which way do you want to go on this line” became challenging. While the transit operators may think that “inbound” and “outbound” are perfectly descriptive, many riders find the terms confusing. The final version of Transporter solves this problem quite elegantly by visually plotting each bus stop on the correct side of the street. Genius, right?!

Ljuba developed the app himself, learning Objective C and the iPhone SDK as he went. During the development and beta testing period he allowed for time and opportunity to adjust the design as needed. User testing and fast iteration was an important ingredient to the app’s success.

Transporter arrived in the the App Store in late May. You can check it out for yourself . Also available is Ljuba’s thesis paper (pdf) where he goes into much more detail about the project.

Towards the end of our meeting Ljuba noted:

“These projects have moved me from never thinking about design as a career into not considering anything else.”

Adaptive Path is thrilled that he’ll start that career with us. We’re going to do great things together.