MY BUS VUE / 2016
DATE Summer 2015 - Late 2015
ROLE Designer
TEAM Designers (5 + Me) / 3 Product Managers, 1 Technical Program Manager, 2 Dev Managers
TOOLS Axure / Confluence + JIRA / Agile Development in 2 Week Sprints
WHY For parents, their kindergartner’s first day of school is one of the most nerve-wracking and emotional days they’ll experience. And that worry never quite goes away after they send their kids off on that big yellow bus year after year. A significant number of school district customers had requested a student-tracking app for parents, and this project became the top priority on the year’s product roadmap.
My Bus Vue is a mobile app (Android and iOS) that allows parents to track their precious cargo as they make their way to and from school, notifying them when a student has swiped their ID card on and off the bus.
HOME SCREEN - LIST VIEW
The list view selected from the header provides a more concise presentation of the stops being followed.
SCAN SCREEN
From the floating action button on the home screen, parents can view a feed of their students’ activity scanning their cards on and off the bus.
In hindsight, I don’t consider that a correct interaction for a FAB button; specifically, one should not be used as a navigational tool rather than a primary action (especially since navigating to the scans screen is not a primary path).
RIDER SETTINGS SCREEN
Parents and guardians are able to access their student’s school with an access code given to them at the start of the school year.
Riders, an intentionally more flexible term for students, and stops can be followed after being added via settings screens.
how my bus vue was made
While the initial concept was to make My Bus Vue the central instrument for communication with school districts regarding transportation, we lacked the evidence that parents wanted more than a moving dot on a map and two notifications a day. So we limited the scope and built what Zonar knew their customers wanted: a way to cut down on time-consuming worried parent calls to the district.
It was my first project at Zonar, kicking off two weeks after I started, and I was the only Zonar designer working alongside a team of consultants. With the upcoming school year looming, the deadline was firm and if missed, put us back a year. We spent a few weeks exploring the problem, two months iterating and presenting lo-fi prototypes to Zonar’s leadership while development was underway, and two weeks doing guerilla user testing on Zonar employees with school children.
My Bus Vue was bought by a few dozen school districts for their parents’ use, who were satisfied with the product and involved with further feature development; however, difficulties integrating with schools’ routing providers meant that the app would not be supported beyond that first school year.