Interview & State of the Art- Ramtin Javamardi

Transcribed interview & State-of-the-art analysis

Before I get into the transcribed interview I just wanted to point out that although this is a semi-structured contextual interview, the first few question resembles a structured interview just so that the interviewee becomes somewhat comfortable with the situation before asking any questions that require deeper contemplation.

Another important factor is that this transcription is translated from Swedish to English.

Contextual Interview

Target group: adults 20-40 years old, leisure traveling.

Location: On the ferry.

Day: Saturday.

1.What is your name

Johan Eriksson.

2. How old are you?

27

3. What is your occupation?

Studying medicine.

4. How often do you travel with this ferry?

8-10 times usually in the summer.

5.Why did you choose to go with the ferry and what was your motivation?

The ferry is quite cosy, and it reminds me of my childhood when me and my parents used to travel with the ferry.

6.What did you like about the ferry and this type of travel?

As I said earlier I find the ferry quite cosy, and traveling on water is more relaxing and breaks up the monotony of constantly traveling with the tube.

7.Did you use any aids to help you travel?

Weather forecast app and timetables.

8.What kind of information did you actively look for before your choice of travel today?

Just quickly looked up the time tables and checked the weather since I want it to be relaxing and windy weather makes me uneasy.

9. Do you use your phone to plan day to day routes/ to plan leisure travel and if you do, what do you look up?

I use my phone when I’m about to take a new route or if I’m going somewhere I usually don’t since I don’t know all the routes by heart, I just use the SL-website to put in my location and destination and that has yet to fail me.

Direct Observation

Quite a bit of sound pollution on the ferry which made it somewhat hard to keep normal conversation without talking louder than usual. Most people on the ferry took pictures and pointed on different things, and the ones we think are in the age range of the focus group all used tablets or phones to take pictures. Since people where having conversations I’m going to safely assume that the atmosphere is far more relaxed than in the subway since no one talks at all in the subway.

State-of-the-art analysis

As one can imagine there are quite a few of different technologies and services available that are relevant to our project. Since we are focused on leisure travellers, one could take a look at some tourist web pages and applications like:

1.     http://www.visitdjurgarden.se/

2.     https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stockholm-city-travel-guide/id369317339?mt=8

some web pages that focus more on the actual transportation route is:

1.     http://sl.se/

2.     http://www.waxholmsbolaget.se/resa/djurgardsfarjan/om-djurgardsfarjan/

In an ideal world I would have the time to compare all of these and analyse them all to come up with some new solution that applies the best of both worlds but unfortunately we are not in an ideal world.  One could also look at this from a broader perspective where one evaluates the experience during the travel and how to for example make the subway less crowded, something that was a KTH project (https://www.kth.se/aktuellt/nyheter/trangseln-i-tunnelbanan-kan-atgardas-1.587402) of course this is very interesting and relevant literature but doing projects of this magnitude as an undergraduate for just one course is not possible. So with all of these factors in mind I concluded that the most logical service/technology to analyse would be the SL-website.

Analysis of the website

The SL website is well known for everyone that lives in Stockholm and even outside of Stockholm. It is in fact so well known that major travel agencies and some tourist websites actually refer to SL.

Before I get into the analysis I will give a short description of what I did to “test” the website, i.e these are my task descriptions.

Planning of trips

1. I assumed that the traveller was in T-centralen since that is the main hub of Stockholm’s transportation. From here I wanted to plan a trip to grönalund. I typed in my current location and my desired destination and the website showed me the fastest route at any given time. It did not show the option to use the ferry from slussen since that would not be the fastest way.

2. Assuming the same scenario but setting the destination to skeppsholmen still did not result the ferry being and option that is presented to the traveller.

3. From the place where I live that is outside of Stockholm, which is skogås to skeppsholmen was the third route I tested out. Here the ferry was the given option since one has to pass slussen and then the website gives the option of travelling with the ferry.

4. I made one last test from hudding which is also outside of Stockholm, but this time I set the destination to grönalund. Again the ferry was an option since one has to travel through slussen to get to grönalund.

Testing of language change and travel rules

I think that finding the English option was fairly easy, one just have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, of course one could argue that I find this easy since I have a lot of experience with websites and hence find it quite intuitive where to look for options. Since our focus group is young adults I think that the fact that I do have a lot of experience with websites does not give a distorted picture of reality, since it is reasonable to expect the same thing from our target group.

The travel rules where also quite easy to find and where clear on what one could bring and couldn’t bring and what to do if one as a traveller is uncomfortable in any given situation.

Analysis

The tests above showed that the SL-website is not really optimized for people that want to use the ferry if they are already in Stockholm. As I suspected the reason for this is that it may not be the most time efficient way of reaching for example grönalund if you are in Stockholm already. The “proof” for this is the fact that the ferry was presented as an option when I changed the current location to somewhere outside of Stockholm.

 The overall functionality of the SL-website is quite good since a lot of the information about the current availability of different travel forms are presented in an intuitive way at the top of the page. Although I feel that some of the information could be hidden under some more tabs/labels since I feel like the first page is somewhat cluttered with over information.

 

The fact that there is so much information makes it obvious that the website is made for people that are used to traveling with SL-services which tells us where their priorities where when making the website. This indicates that we have identified usability and the user experience goals and hence the problem space they had.This assumption then makes it clear why all possible travel routes are not presented, it is because the website is not designed for leisure travel. If one puts in intermediate stops then it is possible to get the ferry as a presented option but that requires knowledge of where the ferry is travelling from and how to get to slussen and so on.

I was fairly impressed by the use of symbols that made it clear what kind of information was hidden behind each button on the website. 

  
This use of text and symbols to make it clear what kind of information is behind the button is a clear indication that some thought has gone into making the website user friendly. Also we can see that the icons picked in the image above are all realistic or a metaphor for what content one can expect to find behind each label. This is evident in the fact that information, for example regarding disabled people is behind the label which has a person in a wheelchair. This label is realistic in that we often associate disabled people with a wheelchair but does also work as a metaphor since we know that there are many more ways to be disabled then sitting in a wheelchair!  

The main reasons people visit the SL-website is to plan an efficient route and check if there are any problems with for example the commuter trains. This is reflected in the fact that information regarding these services have the most screen real estate on the front page. This can be observed in the first picture above, where half the screen is dedicated to this.

In conclusion I would like to compare the SL-website to a Swiss-knife. The service is good for a multitude of different application but does not excel at any. For example, if  someone wants to have a calm experience traveling between two destinations and does not really care about the time, or maybe the same person wants to see some of Sweden’s beautiful nature while traveling between two points. Then there is not option where one can plan a route that satisfies this, but there is actually a way of planning such routes but the website is not built for this since it’s a general purpose tool, which to me signals room for an improvement or development of a new service/technology that can fill this gap. The method which I used to make this final conclusion is the framework presented on page 40 in the course litterature.