Students want to more conveniently arrange for transportation into Boston. Especially for students on the go, purchasing tokens from one of the machines on campus is sometimes inconvenient, and often for a spur of the moment trip students don’t have time to do so. Furthermore, ensuring a spot on a bus and having an idea of a bus’s ETA is incredibly important to students, especially those taking classes at MIT or with jobs/appointments in Boston.

Close

Our users are anyone who utilizes the Peter Pan bus. This group includes: Wellesley students; non-Wellesley, MIT students taking classes at Wellesley; and off-campus Wellesley students. These users, given their young adult status and statistical probability of owning a smartphone, could benefit from a streamlined Peter Pan and T app. By bringing the entire Wellesley Boston transportation experience to one app designed with the Wellesley-MIT bridge in mind, students will never again need to scramble for tokens or miscalculate the last T they can take before they miss the bus.

Close

We are proposing an app that will better serve a student’s time using the bus. The app will have five main functions:

1. Students will be able to purchase electronic, transferrable, one-use, unique bus tokens through the app, avoiding the issue of being stranded in Boston without a token or missing the bus because they needed to run to buy a token. That this is a mobile app suits this idea perfectly-students can buy their token at any moment prior to boarding the bus, eliminating a lot of stress



2. Students will be able to make a reservation for a bus ride in advance, avoiding getting turned away when the line is too long. This is important for certain circumstances such as catching flights, making it in time to interviews and appointments.



3. The app will determine an accurate ETA in real time given the traffic data available on Google Maps, and also show average time that each bus takes (average delay time depending on time and day).


4. Eliminates incentive of bus drivers to accept cash from students when they don’t have tokens and eliminates the black market of fake tokens.



5. Shows how full the bus is expected to be at each location, so people can go to a bus stop that is later on or earlier if they expect it to be full at a particular location.

The app will have screens for: token purchase procedures, map/route/T details, information according to each bus(available seats on bus, average timeliness of that bus in accordance to day/route, information of facebook friends who have also purchased a ticket for a bus). We plan to implement consistent color and functionality scheme for continuity throughout the app.

Close

Gamification

• Link to facebook that shows if any of your facebook friends are on the bus or have reservations for later buses.



• Earning free rides by buying more tickets via the app (like Starbucks, if you use the app, you get rewards) - The app will incorporate a progress bar or punch card visually to indicate how close a user is to their free ride
  Charges if you reserve a seat and don’t go → If you reserve 3x and don’t go, you can get blacklisted, and you can’t reserve again until you do XYZ task/pay some fine; or you lose the money you paid for the ticket
  Premium for reserving seats may result in extra revenue for the bus service and facilitate the free tokens being given out
  What T stops are close to the bus stops of the peter pan/landmarks close-by (restaurants/bars frequented by Wellesley students, frats, etc)



• App will use real time Google Maps traffic data to keep progress bar accurate so that users know how much time is actually left in their ride



• Next bus feature- tells you when the next bus from the city/Wellesley is on the homescreen so that you don’t have to constantly check the schedule

Close

Starbucks Rewards App:
Want to refer to this for its effective use of gamification to motivate users to pay more to earn more free rides. We will show a progress bar rather than a cup of stars.
MBTA App:
Want to refer to this for its use of e-commerce, specifically electronic ticket purchases that change their visual properties to serve as an easy cue to the train conductor that the ticket is valid and unused
Open MBTA tracking: We want to refer to this for its real-time bus tracking capabilities
MBTA Boston T Map: Want to refer to this for its high-quality T map that does not degrade when the user zooms in

These are all free apps with user-friendly interfaces that are popular among college students, or accomplish a desirable goal for college students in an intuitive format. We will combine the motivating gamification used in apps like the Starbucks app, the simple interface of the MBTA Boston T Map which is really just a map of the T, the GPS capabilities of the Open MBTA tracking app, and the online ticketing of the MBTA app to ensure active and motivated user experiences.

Close