Revised Interface Design
April 1, 2004
Task Scenarios:
Task 1: You are a commuter who travels from home to the same office each day through city and highway traffic. You almost always follow the same route and the trip generally takes you about an hour each way. You're at home on a weeknight and you'd like to learn what traffic will be like during your commute tomorrow. A friend recently told you about Road Sage so you decide to consult it. Find out how much traffic you can expect tomorrow morning.
Task 2: You're at home and it's 8:10 Wednesday morning. You've already registered and you've already saved a trip: your commute to work from home. For this morning's commute, determine what type of traffic you can expect and determine whether or not to take a better route, if it's available, that differs from your usual route. Will you make it to work on time? Will you have to rush to make it to work on time?
Task 3: It's Thursday afternoon, you have a few spare minutes at work and you'd like to plan a weekend trip to [ask user to specify a destination within a day's drive that they'd like to visit, but that they haven't visited and don't know the precise route to]. You'd like to meet friends there in the afternoon but you're not committed to a specific time. You're more interested in avoiding unnecessary traffic than in arriving at a certain time. Find out what some of the best possible routes are to your destination, browse the alternatives, choose the best one and print out the directions.
Changes from Low-Fi Prototype
We made several design changes to the interactive prototype, based on feedback from our low-fi prototype. Differences from the low-fi prototype include:
- no map on the front page. Our original low-fi prototype
included a real-time traffic map on the front page; however, this misled
users into thinking that our system only calculates real-time traffic,
rather than predictive historical traffic patterns.
- better distinction between real-time and predicted traffic
forecasts.
- To alleviate user confusion between real-time and predicted traffic views, we re-designed the interface to make this distinction more clear. The front page makes the distinction more obvious with the "When I'm Going" option. If the user is travelling right now, our system will consult real-time traffic. Alternatively, the user can choose a forecast of future traffic in the case of planning ahead for a trip.
- For clarity and understandability, we changed the map title wording from "Real-Time Traffic" to "Traffic Right Now"; and from "Estimated Traffic" to "Forecasted Traffic".
- Additionally, the explanatory wording has been clarified on the "Forecasted Traffic" and "Traffic Right Now" pages to emphasize the difference. In text placed above the forecasted traffic map, we explain "This map shows expected traffic for the trip you specified on Monday, arriving at 9 a.m., based on traffic records for that time and day of the week over the past two years." This wording is designed to further explain the historical data shown on the map.
- We made the background color slightly different for Real-Time versus Forecasted traffic views.
- no arrival/departure time toggle on the interactive
map. Our low-fi prototype contained a toggle between arrival
and departure times below the slider on the predicted traffic map. For
example, the "arrival" toggle would treat the slider as arrival
time, displaying the traffic map and travel times given the chosen arrival
time. The user could switch the toggle to a "departure time"
view of the map. We removed this toggle, because our user tests demonstrated
that once arrival/departure had been selected in the "Plan New
Trip" form, users never switched mid-task to the other alternative.
Now our interface contains a single option for arrival/departure time,
on the front page "Plan New Trip" form.
- start and destination points re-iterated on the map page. To remind the user which trip is being mapped, we added a "From:" and "To:" field on the map pages, which repeat the start and destination points the user has entered.
- "adjust trip" option on the map page.
The user can now change his/her travel details by clicking this link
from the map page.