April 2021 - May 2021
(1 Month)
Product Design
(Solo)
Design a software for a transportation engineers to create physical layouts of a new subway system connecting high-traffic routes during peak commute hours in a city.
Proposed the design of a new software levaraging data visualization techniques such as donut, radial and chord charts enabling transportation engineers to gather insights of traffic flow and design effective subway layouts.
The Subway Layout Software should assists Transportation Engineers in completing their tasks. Given the nature of the user group, I made the following assumptions:
The primary goal of the user is to design new Subway layouts and determine its effectiveness based on rate of traffic mitigation.
Based on the user's goal, I identified three main areas of focus - Traffic Analysis, Designing Layout and Impact Analysis.
The solution should enable users to visualize and analyze map and traffic data for a given city, gather insights and use those insights to create a subway layout using design tools. The solution should allow the user understand impact of new layout and make iterative changes to the layout. Through the use of artifical intelligence, softwares today can assist users in effective ways to complete a task such as recommending layouts but for the purposes of this project, this has been left out of the scope.
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To assist transportation engineers analyze traffic data, the design should support visualization of information. I conducted a secondary research, to identify traffic data visualization techniques. To make effective layout decisions, I also conducted a desk research to understand existing problems in designing subway layouts and familiarize with current-day layout designs.
This paper summarizes the existing visualization
techniques to visualize high-traffic datasets that contain multiple variables,
of which time and space are most important.
Subway systems should serve people living in high-density low-income neighborhoods. This helps transportation engineers design subway lines that can serve the underserved areas of the city.
Subway maps abstract geographical details to help users navigate the subway with only essential information. This design principle can be incorporated for creating subway system design application.
Design should enable the user to
Visualize map and traffic datasets.
Interact with the Visualizations and datasets.
Create subway layouts using components such as lines, stops and junctions.
Compare and contrast different designs....
With a strong understanding of the task the user wishes to accomplish, I designed a few low-fidelity mockups to bring my idea to life.
I defined the following visualizations that would help the user gain insights from traffic datasets.
After getting feedback on the initial sketches, I designed the wireframes that user can click through.
After adding a few more details and functionalities, I designed the below visual mockup to demonstarte the design of the software application.
The following features define the software design and how they assist the user in designing effective subway layouts.
User can change visualization complexity by applying or removing data layers that best assist them in inferring insights and making decisions.
Providing hierarchical grouping of lines and stops enables user to easily identify and edit design elements and make design iterations.
Providing dynamic visualizations such as donut, radial and chord charts allows user to focus on region of interest and leaves the guess work out of the design decisions.
By comparing multiple layouts, user can analyze the impact on high-traffic zones and select the best layout design.
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Overall, I enjoyed taking on this design activity. Coming up with a design solution for a user group that you do not have direct access to and their profession that you do not know much about was challenging. However, utilizing other resources to conduct research and looking at other tools for inspiration, I was able to design solution that meets the user requirement. Designing from a data visualization perspective allowed me to push past my limits and eventually, also added value to the project.