Defining Success for a Pandemic-era Transit App
rideCAT mobile app research
Digital ad via Collier Area Transit
Project Details
Client
Collier Area Transit (CAT)
Team
Myself; a Spanish language translator for in-person interviews and survey translation
Role
User Researcher
Methodology
Evaluative Qualitative Research (Field Observations, In-Person Interviews, Paper Surveys)
Timeline
Spring 2021, Four weeks
The Problem
Collier Area Transit launched a contactless ticketing app during the COVID-19 pandemic as a public-health intervention and a modernization of fare collection. They had analytics on app usage that showed what riders did, but had no way to understand why, and they couldn't see who was being excluded.
Without this additional context, there was no meaningful way to set success metrics, prioritize improvements, or understand whether the communities most reliant on public transit were actually being served by this solution.
Alex Driehaus/Naples Daily News/USA TODAY - FLORIDA NETWORK
What I did
As a one-person research team, I ran nine days of field research at a major transfer hub and onboard buses—interviewing and surveying 26 app users, 56 non-app users, and 16 bus drivers, in English and Spanish.
26 App Users
(20 in-person interviews,
6 paper surveys)
56 Non-App Users
(18 in-person interviews,
38 paper surveys)
16 Bus Drivers
across various routes
and times
What I Found
-
Riders who used the app loved it, but adoption was blocked by awareness gaps, onboarding friction, and equity barriers that analytics alone couldn't see.
-
Drivers were an untapped adoption channel. Every driver who I interviewed liked the app, but had zero resources to help riders use it.
-
Rider frustration traced directly back to legacy farebox hardware, a problem that CAT had already flagged in its Ten Year Development Plan. The outdated technology caused inconsistent service and a poor user experience.
The Impact
This research opened the door for CAT to move from reactive, analytics-only tracking to an intentional measurement framework, introducing new success metrics including:
-
Adoption rate benchmarks
-
Route efficiency comparisons
-
Driver satisfaction tracking
-
A "Rider disappointment" scale to measure how essential the app had become to people's daily lives
What I Learned
I learned how to streamline my interview process and survey questions. For future projects, I would do more preliminary research to understand the population and to consider the constraints of field work. In this case, additional language options like Spanish and Creole were necessary, which was not apparent at the start. Covid was a huge constraint with most people masked and keeping some distance. Additionally, the time limits on bus rides and noise of transfer stations made in-person interviewing difficult. I learned to be adaptable and adjusted my interview questions to be more direct and changed my language for clarity.