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OVERVIEW

Designed an all-encompassing public transit progressive-web application for tourists visiting Atlanta for the World Cup in 2026

  • MARTA being the largest public transit system in the South East of the United States were looking to incentivize their usage as it gears up for the upcoming FIFA 2026 World Cup matches in the city.

  • My team and I, as part of the MS-HCI program at Georgia Tech collaborated with the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) for a semester-long industry-sponsored UX project as part of our course curriculum for our Research Methods for HCI class based on this very matter.

  • Being a progressive-web application, users need not worry about having to download an app from the application store but can view it from their browser and access it just like any other mobile app.

PROJECT DETAILS

Company

Industry-Sponsored project with MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority)

Duration

Aug 2024 - Dec 2024

Role

UX Researcher and Designer in a team of 4

PROBLEM STATEMENT

“How might we incentivize and encourage MARTA use during the 2026 FIFA World Cup?”

THE SOLUTION

  • Home Page: 

    • ​Easy access to hotspots of popular tourist locations around Atlanta

    • Navigate to your preferred destination

    • Easy access cards featuring app's key functionalities

  • Service Alerts: 

    • Users can easily filter through service and facility alerts on every page

    • Helps them stay informed and plan their trips​

  • Chatbot:

    • Interact with MARTABot, an AI assistant designed for timely and reliable support for frequently asked questions​

  • Trip-Planning: 

    • ​Choose from recently searched or favorite destinations 

    • Find accessible routes or routes with least walking and other preferences

    • View real-time information about train arrivals and concerns along route

    • Automated transcription for MARTA announcements

  • Group Navigation: 

    • Join and create groups 

    • View the locations of other members in your group 

    • Make members of your group your dependent to handle their tickets

    • Add meet-up spots for you and your group

  • Tickets Purchase:​

    • Purchase tickets for yourself and your dependent​

    • Reload your ticket or purchase one-time tickets

    • Browse through ticket bundles

  • Events:

    • View upcoming matches, World Cup-related parties and other events​

    • Save these events and get directions to reach them

  • Report: 

    • The most crucial aspect allowing users to feel safe as they navigate through the MARTA system

    • Gives users all-time access to MARTA personnel to report feelings of unsafeness and other anxieties

    • Make an emergency call for immediate support

    • File reports from a variety of categories including health, safety and ticketing concerns

    • Track real-time progress of filed reports to reduce worries

USER RESEARCH

Users want a stress-free journey to travel around and explore Atlanta

  • We started off by having discussions with the team at MARTA about the current scenario and past experieinces

  • Hearing their perspective, we also conducted some preliminary research (including literature review, data analysis and ad-hoc UX analysis of existing apps) to inform us of our primary target user groups and stakeholders who we identified to include the following.

  • Based on this, we established key research questions where we seeked to understand

    • the behavior of potential world cup spectators,

    • how they would choose between different modes of transit, and

    • their behaviour when travelling across cities both familiar and unfamiliar to them.

Thus, our User Research journey began...

Questionnaire Survey

Being the lead in designing the survey, I, alongside my team aimed to understand users' preferences, likes and dislikes when it came to public transport in general and how soccer fans behave or travel around in unfamiliar and familiar locations

Analyzing the responses from 104 users, we found that:

83%

travelled with at-least one other person

46%

used no MARTA app

31%

used the MARTA ticketing application

Users wanted:

Event Suggestions

Better Fare Payment

Real-time updates

Observations

  • Trying to understand the behaviour of our potential users, we conducted both ethnographic and video observations at MARTA stations following the journeys of spectators of the Atlanta United vs. Inter-Miami CF game happening at the Mercedes-Benz stadium, individuals quite literally matching our primary target user group of soccer fans going to the stadium.

  • Analyzing the data through affinity maps and heat maps, we understood keyuser touchpoints and areas for improvement to enhance the user experience.

Passengers:

Were confused by directions

Hesitated to ask for help

Faced challenges with signage

Frequently checked their phones for guidance

Interviews

  • To gain deeper insights, we conducted user interviews with potential visitors, MARTA frequent and infrequent riders as well as MARTA employees (including their own accessibility committee and ridership advisory council) to see what was feasible, rider preferences, grievances were and their perceptions of MARTA .

Our interview analysis through Affinity Mapping showed that...

Users valued:

Event Updates

Live Transit Information

Safety

Users had concerns with:

Group Travel

Information Overload

Ticketing System

Comparative Analysis

  • Finally, we did a comparative analysis by first predicting who the top 5 countries whose visitors are most likely to attend the World Cup based on previous trends of world cups would be.

  • We aimed to not only see what these other transit systems around the world did well at but also gain a sense of understanding of what our potential users might be accustomed to.  

  • Post the research phase, we gathered all our insights to make meaning out of it primarily in terms of affinity maps, data analysis and visualization.

  • Ultimately, we understood that our users are most likely:

    • ​to travel in a group,

    • want easier ticketing and

    • a stress-free trip-planning tool

  • economically around Atlanta especially using public transport - all of which should be under one encompassing application as opposed to MARTA’s current system containing multiple applications.

IDEATION PHASE

Support users’ need to have an easy and independent way to travel 

  • Our research insights helped us develop an ultimate set of 10 design implications to inform us of our design direction towards building a user-friendly digital solution to help users. 

Design Implications

  • Based on the previous stages, our team created 2 personas and user journeys representative of our potential users allowing us to better equip ourselves as we set out on our brainstorming sessions to identify relevant solutions. 

Persona 1

Persona and user journey 1

Persona 2

And then we began ideating and sketching...

Crazy-8s

  • We sketched out ideas based on crazy-8s and ultimately found groupings within these ideas which we identified to be features. Some of these features included group trip planning, discussion forums and implementation of AR navigation. 

  • ​We discussed them and came up with 7 sets of sketches based on each of the discussed features which we then conducted a feedback session for with MARTA enthusiasts and employees at the MARTA headquarters.

  • Ultimately, we understood that there were certain restrictions and policies that MARTA would have to consider when it came to implementing things like discussion forums (which would require moderation), AR features (which MARTA is already working on and would require further technical considerations) and the safety features.

  • ​Something our team also lost sight of during this session was that we started designing for MARTA in general rather than making it something centric for the World Cup.

    • We realized we were trying to tackle a lot more issues than choosing to focus on the major ones that would be required for World Cup visitors.

  • Therefore, we got back on track and headed towards our next stage.

Analyzing feedback on lo-fi wireframes

We found that:

Most features were hidden

 

There was a lack of structured information

 

​Users were confused by MARTA jargon and general functioning of the system

  • We now had enough information to start levelling up the fidelity.

  • Alongside another teammate, I set out to restructure the flow to address the user issues we found in the previous stage.

  • Additionally, the two of us were also responsible for setting up the design system and building a visual language that matches MARTA's mission and priorities.

Color Palette

To offer users a sense of warmth, safety and trust while at the same time retaining MARTA's branding, we chose to use the iconic Pantone Process Blue as the primary color.

 

I was also responsible for creating flexible buttons, input boxes and toggle buttons amongst others! As for the iconography, to make it as clear as possible, to all potential users we made use of Google's Material Design icons.

Diving into the Design System...

​The application being new and MARTA's future plans of integrating their numerous apps into one, we only thought it made sense to build a design guideline which could serve its purpose here and in the future!

​

Retaining MARTA's iconic branding and keeping in mind their priority, we chose colors from MARTA's official branding system - in order to keep the application recognizable!

Components

PROTOTYPING PHASE

Prioritize features that users would find most useful, showing them upfront

  • It was time to convert our sketches into low-fidelity prototypes and test it out with potential users to gain their feedback and their intuition while navigating with the app. 

  • For the feedback, we intentionally chose a diverse set of users Frequent MARTA riders, non-riders, and international transit riders to test it out along with a set of 10 tasks.

We then set out to build our high-fidelity wireframes and test it out with experts and users.

EVALUATION PHASE

Understand users’ cognitive models by remembering who you’re designing for

  • The hi-fi prototypes were tested with both experts and end-users wherein they were given a set of 8 guiding tasks with the only difference being that the experts were involved in a heuristic evaluation based on a combination of both Nielsen’s & Schneiderman's heuristics and Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design. 

Expert Comments

Expert Comments

Overall, we obtained a grading of 89%

User Comments

  • We identified the comments our users had, grouped them by various categories.

  • Some setbacks existed in the grouping page, placement of alerts and scrolling functionalities.

  • This feedback was very helpful in making the final design for the application. 

You can interact with the prototype here:

REFLECTIONS

Don't lose sight of your goal

  • I think one of the biggest lessons we learnt through this project is the fact that we were trying to address many of the gaps that existed within MARTA’s system resulting in creating a solution that was made generally for all MARTA riders as opposed to our focus on the World Cup. Therefore, the problem space became way too vast for us (especially considering the fact that we had to finish this within 4 months) to the point where our team was a bit overwhelmed and we had to remind ourselves of who we were designing for. 

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Thanks for visiting the COOP!

Want to strike up an egg-citing conversation? 
Reach out to me via the following links:

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Chicken saluting representing gratitude

© Shachika Thanigaivelu

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