Client: Capital Metro Transit


Capitol Metro, a city transit agency, wanted to rebrand as a consumer transit portal. To accomplish this, we redesigned their user experience from the ground up.

The original website was comprised of 1600+ pages. Many of them were pdfs of schedules. This material needed to be condensed into a user friendly format. To accomplish this we set out to understand the users. The user research phase included analytical data from the existing website, ethnographic studies, contextual inquiry and a variety of statistical methods. Additionally, we did a complete content inventory to determine existing functionalty, content and features. Other research included a competitive analysis and reviewing industry leading transit sites.

Based on this data and with input from the client we began creating user personas to help guide UX and the development team. The personas acted as our mental model of the users and provided a good heuristic for determining how a particular user group would interact with the content, features and functionality.

Tools used: Axure (wireframes) In Design (UX brief) Illustrator/Photoshop (imaging) Visio (user flows) Excel, Word, Powerpoint (business documents).

The complete UX brief can be downloaded, but here are a few highlights from the project. The following page is a typical persona for this project. These personas were built using three criteria; Bexperience, Behavior and Unmet Needs. Each of these areas breaks down further. The need for personas is to tie design decisions to user behavior. In most circumstances, we have little understanding of how users with interact with a system, despite the research undertaken. Personas serve as a good heuristic to help us understand how a particular user group might react in a given situation. It also helps us to put a human face on a set of statistical information.



Below is part of a site map outline. This document is a non-graphical representation of the site content. Each page is shown within the hierarchy of the site and categorized by the component, content type and template. This is a good way to keep a lot of content fairly well organized. It is not a replacement for an "org chart" style site map, just a way to complement it.

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Next up is a typical user flow. User flows tell the story of how a user will accomplish a given task. It doesn't necessarily reveal all of the aspects of an interaction, but it should give a clear picture of the user's path. This particular flow is for signing up for alerts.



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