CapMetro Accessible Experience
Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority (CapMetro) is a public transportation provider in Austin, Texas. It operates bus and rail services in the city and surrounding areas.
Team
2 UX Researchers
Type
Accessiblilty
Timeline
September - December 2022 (12 weeks)
Choosing our Domain
Key Metrics
"How do we make public transportation more accessible?"
.png)
User Interview of Public Transportation
"While interviewing getting a large sample size users can be rather difficult, thankfully, there are many videos of Youtubers interviewing individuals, with some form of impairment, sharing their experiences and pain points about using public transportation and here is what they had to say (paraphrased):"
Impairment: Degenerative Spine Disease
“In my area it’s a lot of grass and no shelters and standing in the sun”“some of the access points (bus stops), disabled or not, is not easy to access.”
Impairment: Muscular Dystrophy
“Paratransit services are available but generally require 24 hour notices and are not convenient for quick trips”“Making sure your routes and schedules match up with where and when you need to be somewhere can be difficult .”
Accessibility Initiatives (Cap Metro)
CapMetro has made great efforts to make the physical experience of riding public transportation more accessible!
- Free “Travel Training” program for seniors and riders with disabilities
- Priority Seating Access
- Calling out stops
- Tether Strap Program.
- The Metro Access service
- Service animals
....But how about the digital experience?
How can we take this knowledge, make a plan, and share our ideas for improvements with different UX departments?
Issues We Found
User Interface Improvement Recommendations
.png)
.png)
.png)
Discipline Approaches
Discipline Challenges
Summary
What we learned:
From case studies and user interviews, we learned that in both the physical and digital world, there are many areas for CapMetro and public transportation, as a domain, to improve the accessibility of their services.
From UX disciplines:
From understanding how other UX disciplines can help and the challenges that they may face, we learned that strong teams, good communication, adequate resources, a forgiving timeline, and a mutual respect for each other's craft is necessary to create a viable product. There are so many pieces to the moving puzzle and we can all benefit from learning how our peers’ challenges can be influenced by how we ask for help. As UX professionals, we have a responsibility and the power to make the world better for those around us and should always be the first on any team to show initiative in making our products or services more accessible, enjoyable and user friendly.
From the overall project:
Even though public transportation is required to be compliant with WCAG 2.1 standards, Accessibility stems beyond color contrast ratios and alt texts. We learned that Accessibility and Usability are not interchangeable, CapMetro is a textbook definition of an application that is technically “accessible” but not “usable” as it does not provide a good user experience.
For more work related inquires, please email to kevchen1129@gmail.com
Thank you for reading!
.png)
.png)