AIM
A reimagined transit service for Baltimore seniors.
Project Overview
Objective
Design a new multi-touchpoint, physical-digital hybrid service that identifies an observed issue or opportunity in mobility. Developed as a group project with Angelia Thompson, Derek King, and Wyatt Haversack for my Service Design class at The University of Baltimore.
Solution
My team’s mobility service is designed to enable Baltimore seniors to get where they want to go reliably, safely, and affordably. By reimagining an existing senior-focused mobility service provided by Action in Maturity (AIM) — a local nonprofit — our solution puts Baltimore seniors back in the driver’s seat of their lives.
How It Works
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Customers can reserve a seat on an AIM bus either over the phone or through our newly designed AIM app.
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On the day of their trip, they can take a subsidized taxi to AIM’s center and back home, eliminating the organization’s currently unpredictable door-to-door service.
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They can then wait comfortably in AIM’s center before taking a bus to their final destination, no longer having to find shelter themselves as they wait for the bus.
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Customers can also suggest new destinations at any time through the AIM app or over the phone, they can vote on trips for upcoming months, and they can track their rides within the app to always understand their ETA.
My Role
Project Manager, Lead Researcher, Interviewer, Analyst, and Writer, and Designer (including designing the majority of our boundary objects and the final AIM prototype).
The Process
Senior mobility is a big issue in Baltimore, so my teammates and I agreed early on that this was the problem we wanted to tackle. After researching available transit options for Baltimore seniors, we learned that none of them offered the reliable, affordable, accessible, and extensive services that would make them useful in seniors' everyday lives. But of the available options, AIM's mobility service came the closest to fulfilling this need. The transportation service exclusively serves Baltimore seniors, and its members can catch AIM’s door-to-door grocery shuttle or a group bus to several special destinations each month for an affordable price. However, the organization operates on a shoestring budget, and an increase in ridership during the pandemic had resulted in some extreme delays to its door-to-door service.
These delays sometimes left AIM's customers stranded out in the world with no information on when they could expect their bus to return, leading some formerly loyal customers to feel that they could no longer trust the service. AIM also doesn’t allow members to choose destinations, which limits the amount of autonomy that the service provides them.
For our project, my team wanted to solve these problems.
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Discovery
To start, we knew we needed to dig into the problem space. After performing desktop research into local transit options and looking to national and even international transit solutions for inspiration, we turned our attention to our customers. We hosted two user interviews, using the insights we gathered to develop the personas that would drive our work.
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Experimentation
Once we had a solid understanding of our customers, we were ready to start coming up with solutions. We kicked things off with an ideation session, brainstorming as many wild ideas as we could think of and jotting them down on sticky notes. We then picked our favorite ideas and rolled them into a storyboard prototype. Finally, we tested our prototype with one of our users, hosting a sticky note feedback session with her.
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Implementation
Our user testing provided us with invaluable insights that we used to hone our ideas even further. We incorporated all of this feedback into our final solution, refining it as we developed a variety of artifacts and boundary objects.
Our final solution solves the most critical pain points with AIM’s existing mobility service.
It eliminates the logistical nightmare of AIM's current door-to-door service offering, bringing the riders to AIM instead. By partnering with the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) to expand its existing (and underutilized) subsidized Call a Ride Taxi service to cover seniors, riders will be able to travel to AIM for just $3 (a cost that could also be offset by FTA Section 5310 grants and other available federal, state, and local funding sources). And while AIM currently has no system for gathering feedback from customers on locations they’d like to travel to in the future, our solution enables them to vote on upcoming destinations every month. This is made as easy as possible through our app's straightforward and accessible interface.
Thanks to these (and other) features, our redesigned AIM service is one that seniors can trust to get them where they want to go reliably, safely, and affordably.
