SELF-INITIATED UX STUDY • 2025
Pathly
Exploring a platform to help students & working parents with daily commute
This is a self-initiated concept project. It was not created for, commissioned by, or affiliated with an existing product or organization.
At a glance
- MY ROLE
- UX research, & design
- TOOLS
- Pen & paper, Figma
- SCOPE
- Mobile flow
- RESOURCES & LINKS
- Figma Prototype Research Board
01 / CONTEXT
The opportunity
People often have to relocate for work & education. This introduces hurdles when arranging everyday commute, which become even more cumbersmome when handling other responsibilities. Pathly aims to explore solutions to help facilitate reliable means for transport ensuring worryfree travel for users.
Design question
How might we assist students & parents complete their daily commute while keeping it reliable & efficient to use?
02 / DISCOVERY
Learning before making
I was at college while researching on this problem, & conducted in-person user interviews with three students to understand their concerns & prepared two user personas to model their interaction. The interviews questionnaire was prepared beforehand, and included their current concerns & shortcomings they faced with current solutions, alongside what they would actually prefer. A competitor analysis was also performed to understand the product landscape & their value propositions.
What I learned
- Users needed time-punctuality, & cost-efficient means, considering the frequent & recurring nature of travel
- Current ride-hailing solutions were expensive, while public transport lacked a centralized schedule, & whatever information was available was in the local language, & often times incorrect
- Users needed verifiable transport means. They were also very keen to have a potential app be multilingual.
03 / DIRECTION
Turning insights into a focused concept
Early testing surfaced a consistent pattern: users found the hosting flow hard to trust, the terminology hard to parse, and the navigation harder to use than it needed to be for a task as simple as figuring out how to get somewhere. Rather than preserving every feature from the first pass, the concept was narrowed toward a smaller set of decisions users could complete with confidence — creating a carpool without a dense form, reading search results without decoding what a 'route' was, and getting around the app without hunting for a home button. Each principle below reflects one of those trade-offs: what got simplified or removed, and what that cost.
Design principles
- Bottlenecks with ridesharing — User consensus showed distrust in hosting rideshare with strangers, preferring people tied to the user's existing context (workplace, school, building) over open access. The trade-off would be a smaller pool of options for users without an existing network, which would impact the experience for users who have only just relocated to an area.
- Reduce friction over completeness — Users found the carpool creation form tedious. The map-based route builder was replaced with a destination box and auto-calculated ETA, and seating fields were narrowed to what hosts really cared about (backpacks, sports gear, baby seats) instead of granular luggage & seating info. The trade-off was less precision for hosts with unusual capacity needs, in exchange for a form mushc simpler & intuitive for the purpose.
- Plain language over system language — Terms like "Route" and "Places" left users guessing, so search results were restructured to lead with destinations, "Route" was renamed to "Travel," and step-by-step commute detail moved behind a tap instead of sitting up front. The trade-off was commute details sitting behind one extra tap.
04 / DESIGN
The proposed experience
The prototype below focuses on three moments in a typical commute: figuring out how to get somewhere, offering a ride when it makes sense to, and moving through the app without hunting for where to go next. It walks through these using a single scenario, a user planning a work commute.
Finding a way to get there
Search leads with the destination. Tapping results show detailed walkthroughs.
Offering a ride without friction
Creating a carpool takes a destination and a few taps.
One place to start
A single search bar and profile avatar, so there's no ambiguity about where a task begins.
05 / REFLECTION
What I would carry forward
This project was built and tested during my B.Tech coursework, which shaped its scope. All five study participants were my roommates and friends, a sample that skewed toward people already comfortable with each other & with campus life, not working-parents or new-to-a-city personas the concept was made for. That is the first gap I'd like to address. I'm also not fully confident in two assumptions: if keeping transit data current is feasible to maintain long-term, & that the app has a natural shelf life by design – as someone learns a commute well, they will need less step-by-step guidance, which raises questions about long-term engagement that my study sample couldn't answer.
Next steps
- Test with people closer to the target personas, working parents and relocated people, rather than my college-based sample, since none of the five participants sat outside my own social circle.
- Investigate the feasibility of keeping public transit information current; this is more of an operational question than a UX one, but it determines whether the public-transit walk-throughs can be trusted.
- Explore what the app offers a user once they've become familiar with their commute, since usefulness may naturally taper off. This is worth understanding before investing in retention-driving features.