Group Summary of Interviews & State of the Art

Summary of interviews

The people that where interviewed, where a good mixed group. We had some people that where slightly older than our focus group and a few exchange students. We did not perform the interview on the same day on purpose, since we thought that maybe by doing them on different days the “pool” of people we would come in contact with would be diversified.

The ages of the interviewees ranged between 25-55 which as I mentioned earlier is slightly above our focus group which showed since the oldest individual said that he did not use his phone for much and he did not while the younger ones mentioned that they used Google to find the SL-website. The station itself was also a source of information that seems to do its job as a proper information source. But generally they used their phones in combination with the SL-website and some applications.

Something that was really interesting was the fact that all of the interviewees used the boat not because they saw it as the fastest option but rather because they felt that it was a pleasant experience. Some remember the times when they had been on the ferry with their loved ones and choose to travel with the boat to just for a moment be back at those happy times. Others used it to see the beautiful nature of Stockholm in a short period of time in between hectic days, something that gave them a sense of peace and relaxation.

From the answers of the interviewees it is clear that a lot of the travelers have some sort of emotional "connection" to the ferry and the experience associated with that travel route. The way they plan their small trip with the ferry is also quite interesting, they almost exclusively used google to find the sl-website and then used that to plan their trip.

Implications for our design

Using semi-structured interviews were a big part of understanding if your target group is an interesting one, how to target said group, and a general knowledge expander. We also believe that interviewing people outside of our target group was good to see if we could potentially include those as secondary or tertiary target groups or to learn what specifics to shy away from. 

On the contrary, one must also learn to take a step back, using your own reason and theory, and analyse these interviews. One can't always rely on the results being reliable, and that is where the concept of observation comes into play. Furthermore, we also had to analyse our data, taking in everything ranging from cognitive aspects, and so we asked ourselves, what weighs more, the interviews or our own intuition combined with observation and theory, for what man says is not always what man wants.

What we also noticed was that a lot of emotion was involved in the interviews, the subjects were passionate about their traveling and experiences. The key here was to think about what requirements we had to establish for our design. Drawing form chapter 10 in the book we focused on how to achieve these requirements and what we were looking for. So we thought, instead of focusing on what we think the users might want, why not make the user create their own perfect app through customization.

Summary of state of the art analyses

An analysis of the website provided and how easy information was to obtain by Waxholmsbolaget showed good results in terms of design and easy accessibility. However, there seemed to be very specific target groups in terms of languages and thus the product has room for improvement in terms of breadth of target groups without alienating existing ones. There were also flaws in the ticket purchasing, not so much that they were faulty, but more so that it should explicitly state that you have to buy tickets from another source in special cases and so on forth. Furthermore, graphic design was satisfactory and the website seems to be as simple as possible, making the website quite good in terms of a usability aspect, but a bit lacking in information presentation.

Another analysis of the SL website and the analysis focused on using the very widely used function of planning one’s trip and tested different scenarios, important to note was that this test impossibly could test all routes so the analysis was more of a qualitative nature. The analysis also tested in what languages the website was available and thus user accessibility. Conclusions were drawn and one can deduce that the website generally speaking has a very wide use for most of its target group (people traveling in Stockholm), but that there are certain features that are lacking. User accessibility could be improved by raking unnecessary information of the website, such as pinpointing locations outside of Stockholm when using the planning feature even though the planning feature only works in Stockholm. Furthermore how about you wanted to go about your trip, and choosing different transportation methods was an area that could be improved upon. In conclusion, the website and its functions could be described as a jack of all trades, but master of none.

Furthermore an analysis of applications that help travelers plan their trips in Stockholm showed several flaws in SL’s design. There was no official app for traveling in Stockholm even though there is a website that does the same thing, and an app that lets you buy tickets. The problem with a lack of an official app is more than superficial, an official app could be coherent with the design structure and would prevent any misinformation from being spread, and it could also prove to be a tool useful to many of its travelers. Adding to that, where the app to be combined with the ticket purchasing, that would be an improvement in design for instance. Moreover, the languages chosen of the apps where haphazard, some texts where in Swedish, others in English and that is most definitely not good design. It seemed that the apps are targeting local people, which is understandable, but there is definitely room for improvement in that regard, to broaden target groups and to provide a more coherent product and user-experience.

In another analysis we studied the difference between the SL website and application which gave as great insights. The study was primarily based on their ability to nurture the given sources of API that they had in hand. After this we took a look at their accessibility for the different segments of the population. SL has a strong and diverse webpage which strives to include as many users as possible.

All in all these designs have solid designs and interfaces but more so they are lacking in the information regard, which of course is nothing strange. Information constantly becomes outdated and target groups change and respectively their expectations change. However, a common and recurring theme that could be presented is how information was hard to handle. Meaning that a lot of information and resources were available but that it was hard to filter and present the information supplied.

Implications for our design

One factor we noticed was that apps were designed without a coherent design, either in regards to information display, color coding or so. This is something we will try to implement and think about in our design, and to make this as reliably good as possible, a minimalistic and color-coded design seems to be a good choice, as to avoid too much confusion and thus alienate the user. A risk with this type of design is that it becomes too simplistic and excludes advanced users, and seeing as our target group is people familiar with technology this is a risk, what we would do to exclude this risk is to make the app customizable as to allow users to implement their own "open-source" (not per se, but due something similar) type of design.

Another thing we noticed was that the app-developers often excluded or included too few or respectively too many people in their target group. An example of this is Waxholmsbolaget and not adding the simple function of selecting another language as to broaden their target group, or perhaps include these other groups as secondary and tertiary target groups. As we think a lot of tourists might use this app it is a major key to include as many languages as possible and include as many users as possible.

Thirdly, a valuable lesson to bring to the creation of our design is related to customization again, in order to allow the app to progress, allowing users to change the app over time, and continously rework the app to suit the individual.