The Washington State Department of Transportation app features extensive transportation information such as schedules, traffic alerts and weather reports, but hasn’t been updated in about seven years. A team of Informatics students has kickstarted a redesign to help users take full advantage of the state’s public transportation. 

Seniors Arohee Kumar, Jules Braun, Keilani Uehara, Audrey Phan (pictured above, from left) and Daniel Bejar are developing a modernized version of the iOS Washington State Department of Transportation app, aiming to improve the user experience and create a more modern user interface. 

The team formed with a common desire to improve public transportation. Uehara has interned with WSDOT for the past three years and pitched the agency on the idea of sponsoring an Informatics Capstone project last fall.

“They gave us a lot more leeway about what we wanted to do. They wanted us to pitch ideas, so we threw around some ideas and settled on revamping the iOS app,” Uehara said. 

The group’s redesign focuses on a less cluttered appearance and more informative user experience. They are integrating a modern iOS user interface, including the liquid glass software design feature.

They felt that the design of the app could be more user-centered with clearer information displays, causing less user confusion or errors. “We needed to find out if it felt that way to others as well,” Phan said. “We conducted interviews, created polls, did literature review and market research and found that others did struggle with the usability of the app due to weak design.”

After conducting user research, the team created a Figma prototype with updates to key features of the app, including the homepage, the ferries section, the traffic map, and the “my routes” page, which is a customizable section that tailors users’ routes to their preferences. 

Uehara serves as the project manager and a UX and UI designer alongside Phan and Kumar. Kumar also contributes as a team developer with Bejar and Braun. They have been working on developing the app into code from their Figma design. 

Although they initially delegated these roles, the team has found that they work well collaboratively, homing in on each of their individual strengths. “I would say because Informatics is already an interdisciplinary kind of major, we all have a big exposure to a lot of the roles,” Bejar said.

Their ability to work well together hasn’t gone unnoticed. Their sponsor and manager of the WSDOT Northwest Region Transportation Management Center, Sayuri Koyamatsu, has been impressed with their work thus far. 

“The team has done a strong job translating complex transportation data into more intuitive and user-friendly design concepts, while also adapting to the challenges of working with an existing system that has constraints and legacy design elements,” said Koyamatsu. 

She said their effort will improve overall usability of the app, making it easier for the public to access and understand traveler information. 

However, with new developments come challenges. The team ran into issues working with Swift, the programming language for iOS platforms, which none of them had experience using. Thankfully, as seniors in the Informatics program, they felt prepared to take on the challenge of learning the unfamiliar programming language. 

“We had a lot of initial studying to do, which Informatics kind of helped with, because it gave us the background in being able to pick up that language pretty quickly,” Kumar said.

At this point, while the development team works on building the app into code, the design team is working on writing the handoff documentation for WSDOT with further guidelines on how to continue what they’ve started as the project wraps up. 

They hope their project demonstrates to future Capstone groups that their projects can work with public agencies and help support people-facing organizations. 

“As public services go, [WSDOT] is understaffed and underfunded, which is why the apps have been left to age while they work on other, more pressing, issues,” Braun said. “We hope that making this app simple and easy to update will help the developers maintain a high-quality user experience despite their limitations.”