ux-portfolio-rosalep
Riding the B-Line
I recently transferred to Chico State University from Butte Community College, and one of the things that changed is my travel time. While the time it takes to get from where I live to Chico State isn’t much longer than the one to Butte, there are some key differences. For one, Chico State charges for parking. The second is that there is no guarantee that you will even find a spot. Thus, I decided to take Butte County public transportation: the B-Line. My main goals were to know when the bus was arriving and to have reliable transportation to Chico State.
The B-Line has many bus routes that run through Butte County, but I needed one that goes from Gridley to Chico. I did some investigating and found that there is a bus stop about a mile from where I live. The route that stops there is called Route 32, which travels from Biggs to Gridley and stops in Chico. All I needed to do was make sure that I was at the bus stop on time or else risk being left behind.
The first time I planned to go on the B-Line, not only was the bus running late, but I missed it. The whole time I was anxious since the bus wasn’t at the stop at 6:51 a.m., which is when it was scheduled to arrive. As such, the B-Line website proved useful, due to two key features: real-time bus tracking, and a phone number to text that responds with your desired bus’s arrival time.
Here is an image of the stops along Route 32
Using these features, I was able to track the bus that stops near my house, which was barely leaving Biggs. Not only was this efficient, since I did it all on my phone while at the stop, but it made me feel reassured that I would not miss the bus. I was wrong. Though I was at the stop, I was on the wrong side of the road. Consequently, the bus driver didn’t see me and drove to Chico without me. Later, I found out that there were two bus stops on that road: one for pick up (the one on the other side of the road), and one for drop off (the one I was standing at). Thinking back, it makes sense, but I feel that there should be a sign letting riders know which stop is the one for pick-up. This is one of the ways that the bus stop is not error-tolerant. In fact, I’ve seen a few people make the same mistake that I did, so I know that it wasn’t just me.
The next time that I went to the bus stop, I made sure to be on the correct side. That time, I was able to make it to Chico and attend my classes. However, now I had a new problem: riding the bus back home. The bus stop to return to Gridley is the same as the morning drop-off, so that was simple enough. It was learnable, because if you know the stop where the bus drops you off in the morning, then you know where the stop that will take back is. If it had been elsewhere, that would have been confusing and likely have caused me to be stranded in Chico.
The bus ride back home was mostly uneventful, that is, until the bus got closer to Gridley. I realized that I didn’t know how to signal to the bus driver that I wanted to get off. I looked around for some sort of button, but I didn’t see anything, only the red switches and yellow bar for the emergency exits. Luckily, someone else on the bus needed to get off at the same stop that I did, so they pushed the button to inform the driver. Apparently, the yellow bar I saw earlier was a button. What?!
Here is a picture of the button that doesn’t look like a button:
The yellow of the bar is eye-catching (it’s one of the first things I noticed when I got on), but the text is small and vertical, so it was hard to read. Additionally, the stop signal doesn’t match my conceptual model of what it should look like. In other words, my expectation is that a stop signal is a big bright button with the word “STOP” on it. Simple and gets the point across. In comparison, the actual stop signal is a bar with nothing to indicate that it can be pressed. In my opinion, the design of the stop signal could be improved by having a sign next to it, or at least larger text on the bar.