Travo
Mobile / Transportation
Travo is a bus booking solution that enables Nigerian road travellers to book interstate buses across different parks in any given area so they can avoid queues and missing buses due to the usual large crowds at bus parks.
Domain
Self-initiated
My Role
User research, product design, branding
Duration and year
4 months, 2023
Tools
Figma
T H E P R O B L E M
Long queues, missed trips, bus park fights, yikes!
From a young age, I have observed some major challenges with Nigerian bus parks. Problems that have been in existence for so long, they've become accepted and expected.
Road transport parks are usually busy most times of the year with the popular parks seeing up to one thousand passengers per day, whereas, on the flip side, the less popular parks struggle to find passengers.
The queues to book tickets and seats are hard to manage as the parks do not have enough staff to manage these queues.
Arguments and even fights break out due to people vying to get tickets, trying to jump the queues, or over the choice of seats.
The buses usually move early in the morning. Many times, passengers either miss their trips as buses to their destinations may be filled and have moved before they get to the park.
Most of these issues are experienced at the popular parks, whereas there are equally standard and capable bus parks around. By the time the passengers get to these other parks after futile attempts at the popular ones, it may be too late to move.
T H E P R O C E S S
To gain deeper insight into the problem(s) and to be able to get real data to design for, I conducted field studies and user interviews. I visited bus parks and observed the behaviours of passengers. I interviewed park operators as well as passengers to ask some important questions.
Some key insights I gained:
- The booking and seat selection process is a real pain for passengers and park operators alike
- Buses going to different locations move around at the same time, every day across different parks
- Bookings and seat selection are done on an FCFS basis and tickets are marked according to time of arrival
- Park operators are more than willing to provide data on their vehicles and numbers of seats to the app
- Most people start planning for their journey at least a month ahead
T H E S O L U T I O N
Design a simple mobile app that enables passengers to search for and book buses ahead of time, reserve seats, and get tickets.
For the sake of this case study I will only be showing screens from the passenger perspective and not the other part of the solution that caters to bus park operators
L E A R N I N G S
Although I had a rough idea of how the solution would go (At least I thought so) It was interesting to discover some useful insights during research, like the fact that there is a standard departure time across bus parks, which helped to shape certain UX design decisions.
As experienced designers, sometimes we want to skip discovery and research because it's quite a difficult task and we are quite trained at generating solutions. I had never done field study and on-site interviews before. I was amazed by how much I was able to discover about the world of the problem.