DST, or Detroit Student Transit, is a data-driven cross-platform application for students, parents, and administrators aimed at tackling Detroit’s public transportation system that has become a main reason for the severe disparity in Detroit’s public school attendance rates.
DST was built around thorough qualitative and quantitative research in response to the Ford Go Detroit challenge. In the design and development of the product, we were careful to center every step around understanding, defining, and responding to user needs.
Students use the mobile app to program their planned route to school, entering their starting, transfer, and final stops. When they leave the house, they tap to start their journey. The app tracks their location and notes when students arrive at transfer stops.
Less than 30% of Detroit families own a car, meaning that many parents have to rely on public transit to get their children safely to school. This, along with the fact that most parents work (and don’t have the time or ability to accompany their child to school), can definitely be anxiety inducing. The DST parent portal allows parents to track their child’s progress in their journey to school and sends alerts when students arrive at transfer stations and when they actually arrive at school.
Half of the classroom absences in America come from just 4% of school districts, including the Detroit Public School system. A lot of absences come from severe tardiness, something frequently caused by delays in the public transit system. When students are late to their destination, DST generates a PDF report for school administrators to understand the true cause of the tardiness. The report shows the student’s location data and transfer timestamps alongside information pulled from Detroit bus schedules, providing clear proof that the student was in the right place at the right time, and should have arrived at school without delay. This creates a better understanding of students and keeps a record of the need for change, something that could be used in grant or pilot program proposals.
We were inspired by the Ford Go Detroit challenge to create something that improved transit for Detroit residents so they could get from point A to point B quickly, safely, and reliably. We began doing research online to figure out what the challenges with Detroit transit were, and how they manifested themselves in day to day life. When we came across the classroom absence statistic, we knew we wanted to work on a project that would address issues of school children using public transportation.
We centered our research and every step in design and development around the following problem: “Detroit public transit is unsafe and unreliable. Students who rely on it to get to school are often tardy.”
Our research lead us to a few long form articles and interviews with real students and families affected by our problem statement. Reading their stories and testimonies made it easier for us to understand what features a potential user of our product would need or want. One family we looked at had a 13 year old son who traveled 52 miles round trip to school using two city busses. On paper, the trip takes an hour each way. In practice, the boy usually spent between 5 and 6 hours travelling each day, and was frequently late for his classes.
Our research lead us to a few long form articles and interviews with real students and families affected by our problem statement. Reading their stories and testimonies made it easier for us to understand what features a potential user of our product would need or want. One family we looked at had a 13 year old son who traveled 52 miles round trip to school using two city busses. On paper, the trip takes an hour each way. In practice, the boy usually spent between 5 and 6 hours travelling each day, and was frequently late for his classes.
In designing our backend framework as well as the user interface of each platform, we focused on asking the right questions, collecting the right data, and presenting it in a visual hierarchy that is most accessible to the final users. There were major differences in how we collected data from target student users aged 10-18 and how we then presented this data to administrative users.
