Management Structure

Work Distribution

Problem Statement

Personas & Goals

Task Table A: Details

Task Table B: Frequency & Importance

Interview Summary

February 17, 2004

Management Structure

Group & Documentation Manager: Lauren Wilkinson
Design Manager: Sean Savage
Data Manager: Mikhail Avrekh
Software Manager: John Han

Work Distribution

Our team divided the work for this analysis as follows:

Revised Problem Statement

Caltrans traffic sensors placed along highways throughout the Bay Area provide reams of up-to-the-minute data and a warehouse of historical traffic data that’s in the public domain, but plenty of this potentially priceless information is going to waste because it’s inaccessible to regular people.

A couple of existing Web sites provide traffic visualizations based on these data, but the sites present the data in an extremely low level of granularity. A user can glance at these images to get a vague idea of how bad traffic is throughout the Bay Area, but nothing is available that tailors this information to a user’s individual routes, and nothing actively suggests alternative routes based on this data. On the other hand, mapping services such as Mapquest provide personalized direction maps at a high level of granularity, but these resources don’t take into account traffic data. Depending on time of day, traffic can render a Mapquest-recommended route one of the worst possible routes between two points. We propose a system that combines real-time traffic data, traffic forecasts based on historical data, map visualizations and routing services to provide users with a new service that suggests what truly are the best routes and that also allows users to visually explore alternative routes and alternative travel times.

Sensor data does not yet exist for some key traffic corridors in the Bay Area. For example, we do not yet have data for any of the bridges, for 280 or for part of 580. To compensate for this incomplete data set, we will use dummy data to fill in the gaps left by the sensor data. We will build a prototype interface that operates as if it were running on a complete set of sensor data from Bay Area highways, in the expectation that when sensors are eventually installed the data can be worked into our prototype to make a functioning system.

We are designing our system for two core user groups:
    recreational drivers who use the system to explore and choose routes to follow during occasional road trips; and
    daily commuters who will use the system to minimize aggravation and time spent getting to and from work.

The architectural design has not changed from our previous description (aside from generating dummy data to fill in gaps in sensor data):
  on the backend: an Oracle database that archives Bay Area traffic aggregates;
  and the middleware: routing and forecasting intelligence software streamlined from baseline code that has already been developed in EECS.

Personas & Goals

In determining the personas for our interface usability study, we first and foremost tried to find a group of interviewees who would be representative of the needs of various Bay Area commuters and at the same time would be diverse in terms of age, gender, commute schedules and goals, etc. We interviewed 9 people, three men, six women, ranging in age from 22 to 54, with commute goals that varied from mostly recreational driving, bi- or tri-weekly commute to work, regular commute to school, to a daily 80 mile commute to and from work.

Aymanna Holiday represents the latter category – someone who is relatively new to the region and who seeks technological tools in order to help her acquire the expertise she needs to make her daily driving less stressful and time-consuming. Brianna Bridger merges travel needs specific to the Bay Bridge with the needs of a student commuter whose schedule is less regular than work-bound drivers. Ronald Innskeep is a weekend-only driver. Finally, D. Mann, Esq. is a typical daily road warrior who does his best to minimize the headache of his lengthy, yet inevitable commute to work. Our intention was to arm each persona with the planning tools that they would be most likely to use.

D. Mann, Esq. is a 42-year-old tax attorney who works for a large petrochemical corporation in their downtown San Francisco office building. He wears a suit and an everpresent mobile phone earbud. Mann lives in Los Gatos and commutes to the city in his Hum-V every morning around 8 a.m., a distance of about 50 miles; it takes him an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half each day. He lives so far away because during the tech boom he worked full-time for a dot-com in San Jose, and that’s when he bought his sprawling Los Gatos home; then he landed the gig in San Francisco. He usually returns home from work at about 7 p.m., but a few nights each month he has dinner and a drink with colleagues before heading home around 9.

He does a lot of business on the phone and he enjoys the exclusive experience of cruising along in his Hum-V and peering down at the other automobiles. Nonetheless, he’s a tightly-wound type-A personality who hates loose ends and can’t stand the unpredictability of Bay Area roads and highways. Traffic surprises make his ulcer flare up.

Most of his driving life is spent commuting, but he also takes road trips about twice per month; during the winter he heads up to Tahoe and during the rest of the year he spends many of his weekends at his villa up in Rutherford. Mann earns a comfortable living and while he’s not fascinated by electronic gadgets (beyond his phone), he's willing to spend substantial dollars on a tool if it can save him driving time and aggravation and if the tool doesn't introduce many new hassles to his life.

D.’s goals include:
• Make lots of money and invest it effectively.
• Minimize unpredictability and prevent surprises wherever possible in life. D. Mann hates chaos and he works very hard to organize things.
• Impress friends and colleagues.
• Minimize wasted time.

Brianna Bridger is a 24-year-old art school student who moved here a year ago from Minneapolis and she drives about 10 miles to school every day, from Oakland to the California Academy of Arts and Crafts near Nob Hill in San Francisco.

She wears an organic hemp shawl during the cold months and t-shirts and shorts or pants with a cute and ironic trucker hat during the hot months. She heads out for school between 7 and 9 each morning (she has 8 a.m. classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and 10 a.m. classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays). Two days a week she bikes to the BART station, puts her bike on the train, then cycles the rest of the way to school upon arrival in San Francisco. She can’t take her bike the other three days a week because bikes aren’t allowed between 7 and 9 a.m., and that doesn’t jibe with her 8 a.m. classes.

She owns a 1996 Honda Accord and she likes the idea of ditching the car to save money and reduce air pollution, but public transportation in the Bay Area is too limited to serve her needs. Also, on the weekends, public transit is far too much of a hassle to figure out and too unreliable as well. A big problem for Brianna is the lack of late-night weekend public transit options that will get her home if she wants to stick around after school for parties in the city, because the BART stops running at 12:30 a.m. When considering an unfamiliar route, she usually finds it so much easier to just hop in the car than to mess around with alternative transit so she drives more than she’d like.

She hates having to merge in traffic and having to stop unexpectedly so she tends to pay close attention to the traffic up ahead. While she’s quite computer literate and loves using desktop computers for her art projects and for research, she’s not very attracted to the idea of using digital devices in the car because she wants to focus on the road. She especially hates not knowing whether a traffic jam is temporary or long-term; she thinks that better knowledge of these situations, along with better knowledge of alternate transit options, would help her to undertake her commutes more effectively.

Brianna’s goals include:
• Reduce any negative impact she has on the environment and on society, both globally and locally.
• Spread consciousness of the social and environmental issues she cares about by setting a good example of a responsible global citizen.
• Succeed as a student and as an artist.
• Avoid stress and hassles

Manolo Innskeep is a 52-year-old hotel owner and manager who lives in the San Francisco neighborhood of Glen Park, and he enjoys a relatively painless daily BART commute to and from his small hotel near Union Square. He dresses humbly and conservatively. His home is a three-block stroll from the Glen Park BART stop, and his hotel is a four-block walk from the Powell station. He’s not rich by any means, but he’s a third-generation San Franciscan who purchased his spacious house from relatives before Glen Park real estate became insanely expensive.

He hates traffic and parking hassles and he loves this arrangement because he rarely takes his car out of his garage; he does drive to the supermarket once a week but that’s an easy jaunt up and down never-congested O’Shaughnessy Boulevard and there’s always plenty of parking at the Safeway.

But this enviable state of affairs has spoiled Manolo a bit. When he heads out of town on occasional weekend day trips he has trouble summoning the patience and the confidence and the wisdom about local traffic patterns that his neighbors have honed during their daily visits to parking-space purgatory and commuter hell. He does like to head up for an occasional weekend visit with friends in Sonoma. He also enjoys driving out to Half Moon Bay or Pacifica for a relaxing afternoon on the shore on Mondays when the weather is nice. (He has Mondays off.) But he’s quite timid about such drives because the only thing he dreads more than being caught in heavy traffic is getting lost, as he has done on several occasions when he tried to alter his planned route to escape traffic jams.

He’s not a risk taker, so right now Manolo is very hesitant to try out alternate routes and when heading out for a road trip he tends to stick with the directions that friends or Mapquest recommend. But if he had a source of easy and reliable information concerning alternate routes, he’d be happy to take those alternatives.

Manolo's’s goals include:
• Minimize dangers to his health and happiness
• Avoid uncertainty
• Please his customers
• Avoid stress and hassles
• Get out of the city more often

Aymanna Holiday, 35, moved to Mountain View two months ago from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to take a high-tech job in San Jose. She’d never been to California before moving here, and she still feels like she’s on vacation in this strange and exciting region.

It usually takes her between 25 and 40 minutes to get from home to work along the route that Mapquest recommends; unpredictable rush-hour traffic levels cause this wide variability in commute times and this annoys her. As a newcomer she’s still smitten by the charms of the Bay Area so she hasn’t yet reached the level of irritation that her fellow commuters experience. But as time goes on her road-rage level is rising and she’s already looking for ways to reduce her traffic hassles. A few times she left home early to experiment with alternate routes, but each time these experiments just worsened matters, getting Aymanna to work nearly an hour after leaving home.

She starts work at 9 a.m., but traffic is less of a problem by the time she gets off, usually around 7 p.m. At that point, she can take the Mapquest route and almost always get home in 20 minutes, so she’s not really concerned about traffic information on the way home. Aymanna is still learning the ropes regarding Bay Area driving but she wants to look beyond the standard ways of doing things; she’s actively experimenting and playing around with new tools and methods for the purpose of making the morning commute less painful, even if that means she’ll lose time in the short term and arrive at work late a few times in the process.

She has a PDA and she briefly toyed around with a GPS direction-finding application but she found it to be a lot of trouble and not very useful at all. She’s looked into some of the local online traffic-reporting services and sometimes she listens to the radio traffic reports while driving, but she doesn’t have much patience for these resources because they waste her time with a lot of information about traffic throughout the Bay Area when all she cares about is a very tiny subset of all that data: conditions along her potential routes to work.

Aymanna’s goals include:
• Avoid stress and hassles
• Maximize the efficiency of regular tasks and chores, without being completely anal and without devoting too much time and effort to planning
• Explore the Bay Area and make new friends
• Keep up-to-date with new time-saving technologies, without wasting too much time doing so

Task Table A: Details

Task Table B: Frequency and Importance Summary

KEY:	Color shows importance:     = High,     = Medium,     = Low.
	Shape shows frequency:   = Frequently     = Sometimes     = Rarely.

Task		D. Mann	Brianna Bridger	Manolo Innskeep	Aymanna Holiday
Plan and Manage Regular Commutes
	Consider and choose alternative routes for next commute
	Print alternate route directions
	Determine best departure time
	Quickly view estimate of next commute's duration
	Sign up for alerts regarding traffic problems to affect commute(s)
	Find ways to fit public transit into commute plans more often
Plan and Manage Occasional Road Trips
	Consider and choose routes for planned road trips
	Print alternate route directions
	Quickly view estimate of previously-entered trip's durations
	Find more ways to fit public transit into road trip plans
	Sign up for alerts regarding traffic problems to affect upcoming road trip(s)
	Determine best departure time

Summary of Interview Results

Interview Participants

We interviewed 9 Bay Area drivers:
- Rella and Kat, seasoned Bay Area residents who commute 45+ minutes to work.
- Kenna, a new Bay Area resident who has a short daily commute.
- Dave, John and Janna, long-term residents who have short commutes but still drive 7 days per week.
- Jayna, new to the Bay Area, who commutes some days and drives on weekends.
- Luba, a long-term resident who commutes some days and drives on weekends.
- Parker, a seasoned Bay Area resident who drives only on weekends.

Interview Questions & Results

1. Describe age, familiarity with the Bay Area, driving frequency, & daily commute.

Age
Ages ranged from 22—54.

Familiarity with the Bay Area
- Familiarity with Bay Area highways ranges from 5—9 out of 10, with 10 as most familiar.
- 2 people are new to the Bay Area within 8 months.
- The others are seasoned residents who have lived in the Bay Area for 1.5—14 years.

Interview
- Of the Interview , 4 drive 7 days/wk; 1 drives 6 days/wk; 1 drives 5 days/wk.
- Both participants who commute some days drive 4 days/wk.
- The weekend driver drives 1 day/wk.

Daily Commute
- 4 people have short commutes of 6-15 miles (each way), which takes 15-20 minutes.
- 3 people have average commutes of 20-25 miles, which takes 25-45 minutes.
- 1 person has a long commute of 80 miles each way, which takes 1 hr and 45 minutes.
- 1 person does not commute.

Most Traversed Freeways
- The most popular freeways among our participants are: 101, 80, 880 and 280.
- Additional freeways people listed were 580, 980, 24, 237, 85, 17, Lawrence Expwy, San Tomas.
- Most participants mentioned the Bay Bridge as a key traffic corridor in weekend driving.


2. What are the biggest problems you encounter while driving?

- parking: All participants complained that parking is difficult to find. To illustrate, here are some sample quotes from interviewees:

The weekend driver describes a Friday night trip into SF: “…[After being stuck on the
bridge for the hour,] I have to circle around for parking for 10-15 mins. By this time I
really want to get out of the car. When backing into a parallel parking spot I might get
careless and accidentally bump into the car parked behind me.”

A new Bay Area commuter describes her drive home from work: “…[When I arrive
home,] sometimes have to circle around for parking because of street sweeping. I have
to think about what Tuesday it is… to figure out whether it’s street sweeping day and
what side of the road to park on. I can’t park on the main road by my house because
it’s a high-crime area, and our car is threatened there. I must park on a less busy road.
Also I make sure not to park on a hill, because our car is a standard. At 7 pm, when
everyone is home from work, only 2-3 spots for me to choose from… it can take 10 mins
to find a spot on Street Sweeping Days.”

- sudden changes in traffic: Nearly all participants mentioned stop-and-go traffic as a major irritant in freeway driving. Some illustrative quotes:

“I hate sudden changes in the flow of traffic on freeways—being able to cruise but then having to screech to a stop all of a sudden. This causes me to almost get in wrecks a lot of time. It would be helpful to have some warning ahead of time for when traffic is going to stop.”

“One of my biggest problems is stop & go traffic in unexpected places; traffic at arbitrary times when there’s no reason for it… 580 gets busy at random times, I can’t figure out when.”

- not knowing how long a traffic jam will last: All participants expressed frustration at not having enough information about the traffic situation. In their words:

“It’s hard to make decisions when I don’t know how long the traffic buildup will last. Is it for the next mile, or is it all the way up 880 to San Jose? If it’s all the way to San Jose then I could get off & go faster.”

“I time my commute for 45 mins… then one day traffic will be stopped. I can’t see an
accident so I don’t know what;s happening. Traffic seems hit-or-miss. I have no idea
when it’ll let up—it’s very frustrating.”

- changing lanes quickly: 2 drivers mentioned that changing lanes really quickly in traffic while merging is highly stressful. One driver says:

“A classic example is going to Oakland from Berkeley on 580. You have to go over 5
lanes. It’s confusing to know when to switch over to which highway. You’re constantly
changing lanes, and you can’t screw up… each lane leads to a different highway and it’s
difficult to get back on the right track once you make a mistake.”

3. For weekend and recreational driving, how important is traffic information?

- 3 people said traffic is very important for weekend trip planning;
- 4 people said somewhat important;
- 2 people (including the weekend-only driver) said not very important.

4. For your commute, how important is traffic information?

- All of the commuters say traffic is a very important consideration.
- Traffic affects departure time for all commuters: they try to avoid rush hour and other times when the freeway is known to be particularly congested.

5. When you hear of an accident ahead, are you likely to change your current route?

- All participants said they are likely to change their route upon hearing of an accident or encountering congestion, though they would be less likely do this on a weekend drive than they would during their daily commute. (This assumes an alternate route exists… eg, several people pointed out there is no alternative once you’re on a bridge).

- One participant described the psychological benefit of changing the route:

“I like the psychology of playing the game of maximizing time efficiency. I like to think
my efforts make a difference! Being proactive is psychologically rewarding in itself,
even if time savings are insignificant. It’s a placebo effect.”

6. When you hear of an accident ahead, what information do you need to decide whether to change your route?

- what are the alternate routes? All participants said they need to know what options they have for alternate routes, and directions for taking those alternate routes.

- are the alternate routes faster? Two people mentioned that the more useful information is whether the alternate routes are faster. Specifically:

    o What’s the traffic like on the alternate route?
    o Are there stop lights or stop signs on the alternate route?
    o What’s the speed limit on the alternate route?
    o Is everyone else taking the alternate route, too?

- how long will traffic be backed up? One participant pointed out that she would like to know how long the traffic backup will last—if it’s only one more mile, then it’s not worth taking an alternate route.

7. What are your sources of knowledge about the traffic bottlenecks on your most frequent route(s)?
In order of importance, our participants use the following sources:

    o personal experience
    o radio
    o friends and coworkers

Only one person currently uses the Internet to obtain traffic information.

8. Would you consider taking public transit if it were faster than driving because of traffic congestion?

    - 6 people said yes
    - 2 people said no/no option
    - 1 person said maybe

9. How much does parking factor in to your travel planning?

    - 2 people said greatly: parking availability is essential to the trip.
    - 4 people said somewhat, depending on how much time is available and whether parking costs money.
    - 3 people said not much

10. What tools do you utilize to assist in travel planning?

    o MapQuest (7 people)
    o Yahoo! Maps (5 people)
    o Paper maps (3 people)
    o OnStar/GPS (1 person)

10a) What features are helpful with MapQuest & Yahoo! Maps?

    - customized, step-by-step, accurate directions
    - number of miles to the destination
    - the graphic map
    - estimated travel time

One participant said, “MapQuest makes it easy to plot a map. I find this helpful to orient myself in a neighborhood like a paper map.” Another participant added: “MapQuest is changing the way people give directions. MapQuest is better than verbal directions... the old tradition of getting verbal directions is based on having a general knowledge of the area. MapQuest really helps the transient person.”

10b) What problems have you encountered with these tools?
    - poor estimates of travel time. One participant said, “I ignore the travel time estimates completely. MapQuest tries to give a conservative estimate if there’s no traffic. I.e., if there’s no traffic, mapquest totally overestimates the travel time and I can go faster. Conversely, when there is traffic, MapQuest will greatly underestimate the time and it takes me much longer to reach my destination.
    - no traffic information. This makes it difficult to accurately plan for time of travel.
    - occasionally wrong directions.
    - inability to view multiple routes. One participant complained, “I can’t see multiple routes on the same map, even if they're close. Let’s say first I need to go to the store, then some other place. MapQuest makes me look at separate routes in different windows.”
    - no personalized archive of visited places.
    - directions ignore one-way streets.