SELF-INITIATED UX STUDY • 2024

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.

Pathly hero visual showing final prototype key screens — Hero visual: Final prototype key screens

At a glance

MY ROLE: UX research, & design
TOOLS: Pen & paper, Figma
SCOPE: Mobile flow
RESOURCES & LINKS: Figma Prototype

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 ways 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 working on this problem, & conducted in-person user interviews with five 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 prefer. A competitor analysis was also performed to understand the product landscape & their value propositions.

Research artifact showing interview synthesis and user persona insights for Pathly — Research artifact: User interview synthesis, personas, and key findings

What I learned

Users needed time-punctuality, & cost-efficient means, considering the frequent & recurring nature of travel
Current ride-hailing solutions were expensive, public transport lacked a centralized schedule with whatever information that was available being 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 unfamiliar, 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 that macthed the user intent, & getting around the app effortlessly. Each principle below reflects one of those trade-offs, what got simplified or removed, & what that cost.

Concept artifact showing user flow map and wireframe exploration for Pathly — Concept artifact: User flow map and wireframe exploration

Design principles

Bottlenecks with ridesharing: User consensus showed distrust in hosting rideshare with strangers, preferring people tied to the user's existing social acquanitances (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 initial 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 match user needs (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 much simpler & intuitive for the purpose.
Usie of plain language: Terms like "Route" and "Places" left users guessing, so search results were restructured to lead with destinations, "Route" was renamed to "Commute," and step-by-step walkthorughs were 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 results lead with the destination. Tapping results show detailed walkthroughs.

Offering a ride without friction

Creating a carpool takes a destination, the user's vehicle info, and a few taps.

One place to start

A single search bar for finding commute and profile avatar to manage user information, so there's no ambiguity about where a task begins.

Prototype flow: a work-commute scenario across search, carpool creation, and navigation.

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.