Know Your RideFive students came together to improve user satisfaction for the Pace Paratransit Service
Problem
Five students at Northwestern Engineering came together in a classroom in the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center to tackle an ambiguous and complex challenge with no clear solution: improve the user satisfaction of the Pace Paratransit Service that serves persons with a disability across six counties, including Chicago.
Team Members
The team members, Lucas Pagni, Lenin Estrada, Vishal Giridhar, Karen Park, and Taylor Keesling, are all first-year students enrolled in a course called Design Thinking and Communication (DTC). Part of the Engineering First® curriculum, DTC immediately puts students to work on real design problems submitted by individuals, non-profits, entrepreneurs, and industry members. The course is co-taught by an instructor from Northwestern Engineering and by an instructor from the Cook Family Writing Program at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
Process
Giridhar explained how the project began.
“I’d say the initial prompt we were given was 'improve the system of Pace.' We saw that we needed to find a single place where we could change the system, but not to the extent that Pace’s entire infrastructure, which is something that they’ve been working on for the past twenty or so years, would be disrupted,” he said.
Team member Keren Park explained their next step.
“We looked at multiple problems,” Park said. “We thought the biggest problem was the disconnect between the user, specifically the riders and the drivers of the vehicle. There are three different types of users: the actual riders, the Pace dispatchers, and the caretakers who might want to know where the riders are going. How the system works currently is that the user calls in to book their ride. Once that happens, they receive a confirmation call. After that, there is no communication that happens between the rider and Pace Paratransit Services.”
By framing the problem, the team was able to decide on one element of the user experience to improve for the Pace Paratransit Service: communication. It took persistence for the team to arrive at their decision, however. Park described what it was like to get there.
“Design was one of the concentrations I wanted to focus on at Northwestern and it’s kind of intimidating because there are a lot of unknowns,” she said. “I felt helpless at first, like I had no idea what I was doing. But once we figured out which problem to tackle, that’s when things started to fall in place. We found that by increasing the communication between the rider and the vehicle, we could facilitate a better experience. The rider would know “My ride is going to be here in ten minutes” so they’ll be ready for their ride. The caretakers would be aware of where their rider is and they feel secure in knowing that. And, it would save the dispatchers a lot of time for each ride because the rider would be ready, too.”
Team member Lucas Pagni echoed Park’s statement about the ambiguity inherent in the design innovation process.
“The biggest lesson for me personally is sometimes the design process will be very broad. You’ll spend a lot of time doing work that skirts around actually finding a solution,” said Pagni. “Then, there will be a short period of time where you’ll lock in the idea and that’s where most of the work is done. So, even if it feels like you’re not doing anything, you’re narrowing it down until you finally find that idea."
Team member Taylor Keesling explained how they framed the problem in this way and the empathy they had to exercise to understand the needs of the users of the Pace Paratransit Service.
“The problem is that the riders don’t know exactly when their ride is coming,” said Kiesling. “So, they may be waiting outside and they don’t know exactly how long they’re going to be waiting for. Sometimes they may even go inside and then if the vehicle does come, they don’t know that it has even arrived. So, what we really wanted to tackle was that. Nobody wants to be waiting outside for some undetermined amount of time.”
Solution
The team’s final design is called Know Your Ride and they presented it at the DTC Project Fair in December 2016. Teammmate Lenin Estada described the design.
“In essence, the Know Your Ride is an SMS system helps keep the rider up to date with the status of their vehicle,” said Estada. “In doing so, the rider will be able to prepare accordingly for when their vehicle arrives and be ready to go. This speeds up the boarding process, and it is important to note that with PACE every minute saved is equal to one dollar being saved. There are about 20,000 daily Paratransit Service rides, so this can save a significant amount of money.”
His teammate Lucas Pagni broke it down further.
“There are four main messages Know Your Ride is going to send, and these are either via text message or phone call: the first is an itinerary that’s sent right after the ride is scheduled with the time and the destination. Next, twenty minutes before the scheduled time of their ride, they are sent an update letting them know of any delays to their ride. And then ten minutes and two minutes before the estimated arrival time of their vehicle, they are sent updates just letting them know that the vehicle is almost there,” he said.
“We also have updates for secondary users available, if the rider would like to add a secondary user, just to let them know that the ride is safely underway or has safely arrived,” Pagni added.
Giridhar explained that the team feels their design would be easily integrated into the current infrastructure of the Pace Paratransit Service.
“Our system would be quite easy to implement and to integrate into Pace’s current system,” he said. “First, Pace already collects GPS data from the buses and our system would just be repurposing that data into calculating the estimated time of arrival and sending that over to the riders. Second, there’s no change to how rides are scheduled. The riders would still call in and talk to a Pace employee. The only change would be that Pace would be sending them confirmation and updates about their ride.”
The team took away more from their DTC experience than Know Your Ride, including persistance, collaboration, and communication.
“I’ve never been in a class where everything is up to us and we have to decide when to complete things and when to meet,” she said. “I’ve really learned a lot about self-motivation and taking initiative. I think that’s really important in a group setting, to take initiative but also to make sure that everyone else is included.”
Park added that storytelling was another important part of the design innovation process that she learned from the DTC project.
“I’m a mechanical engineering major, so obviously coming into this project I wasn’t too happy that we weren’t going to be building something,” she said. “However, through this project, I learned to digest all the information from a pretty complex system for myself and then be able to communicate about it in ways that other people can understand.”
Giridhar said that persistence was the part of the designer’s mindset that he took away from working on this DTC project.
“As a computer scientist, you’re talking about startups and dealing with data and programming and all of that. I felt like what I learned from this project was that even though you don’t have a set problem, if you put in the time and effort, you will get to a point where you feel happy with what you’ve done. Three weeks ago we did not think we’d have this and it came together and that’s because of persistence.”
The team's faculty advisors were pleased with their efforts.
PACE handed us a very large, open-ended problem. As faculty, we were concerned how the students would respond to this problem, but the team found its focus," explained Richard Freeman, who co-taught their DTC class with John Bishop. "The students figured out a way to help PACE better communicate with its customers, and we hope that improved communications will in turn improve customer satisfaction."
ProgramDesign Thinking & Communication