Where’s the Shuttle?
Patients shouldn’t have to wait
while traveling to their doctor…
In 2018, Jefferson Health offered (free!) pickup and drop off for patients and visitors across center city Philadelphia.
In my daily commute, passing signs for this service, I noticed one critical barrier to access this service… how long should patients wait?
patients shouldn’t have to wait.
While working as Senior UX/CX designer at Jefferson Health, I led a product design effort to improve user experience for our patients and visitors. Working with a talented UX researcher and developer, we launched…
shuttle.jefferson.edu
After spending time waiting with patients for the shuttle, it became apparent that awareness of shuttle location and estimated wait time would enhance ability to engage with this service.
During the design process, myself and members of our team rode the shuttle many times, informally interviewed the drivers and made route observations, coordinated with shuttle company to analyze ridership data and compare this against platform usage. Shuttle Tracker was launched in April 2018 and ridership data was officially collected, daily, in the summer of 2018. In a year over year comparison our team was delighted to see increasing sustainable engagement with the shuttle service.
Signage (Awareness)
We updated the posters that appear at each stop so that people can scan QR code or simply key in shuttle.jefferson.edu and see an ETA immediately.
Over the past two years, we’ve noticed shuttle & fleet tracking platforms are more pervasive, however, I’m proud that when compared to these platforms, ours still maintains four key distinctions:
Simple user interface
Reliable and prominent ETA
No app download required
Clear system status messaging
Retrospective & Next Steps
Analytics reports indicate visits to platform is modest on a daily basis and our team is aware that further publicizing the tracker platform will likely increase engagement with the service.
The ridership data collected also provided insights as to how the route could be optimized for faster pickups and drop offs to popular destinations.
One thing I would have done differently: reach out to the shuttle company and request ridership data be collected before we started designing so that our baseline data set would be more substantial and we would have a stronger case to fund promotion costs associated with this platform.
We are currently planning to revise the UI to further simplify presentation of the data and extend this platform to additional shuttle routes across the Jefferson enterprise.