We just wrapped up another National Transit Employee Appreciation Day and I have been thinking about how so much of the work that agencies do on the daily is so much more than giving presentations, adopting schedule changes, writing reports.
The reaction to people’s faces that is collected by the bus drivers, the conversations with passengers and connecting with other staff should be what we are striving to capture in the AI era. However, the tools that we often see being developed for public transit are often geared towards people who work at a desk all day.
There is so much human level work that is done daily to keeping staff accountable for the up with the demands of riders. So much so that I would say that they have the most job security out of all of us.
As we move into a world where the creation of Word Docs is plummeting like the stock market, and being able to know the “truth” about what your passengers are saying and the history of a bus stop as of 5 years ago is increasing much like the interest rates. So the question becomes why are we so focused on the desk worker when the worker in the field is the real driver of value?
Imagine if you could have the most knowledgeable individual anywhere?
Your most knowledgeable workers are the ones that are in endless meetings and people are always asking for their time. What if we multiplied them by 10? What if we had them in every meeting what if the truth was available to everyone and not just the most senior?
How long do you think it would take you to:
Look at historical analysis of route alignments
Understand why that bus stop 5 years ago and access the assessment
Find out the status of the work order to resolve a route detour
What if you could do this all on your phone without a text, email or meeting?
Where do you think the bottleneck is your agencies success and accountability?
Why Most Solutions Fail
One of the worst things I can here on a call is “What should this be for?” if I hear that, I know I have failed in telling the story and designing something that works for this person. This type of failure is the worst because it is a slow death of a pilot.
Workers avoid it because it slows them down
“That’s not for us” mentality
Hidden options, drop downs, buttons and links
Just another tool that doesn’t work well on mobile
These people are some of the sharpest knowledgeable and resourceful individuals that I have met. They view success as the only outcome not perfection. They are getting people to work and that responsibility of successfully get them there is their driver.
What does successful operations design look like
I think the best example of catering to this type of staff is the ArcGIS Quickcapture mobile app. It is really just a way to allow for field operations to pinpoint locations of objects and maybe fill out a couple of fields.
ArcGIS Quickcapture
A lot of people say that the success of this app is it that the main interface is just “Big Buttons” which is why people sometimes call it “The Big Button App”. This app may be an eyesore for the average user, but for the person driving a truck with their phone on the mount. This is the solution. One screen, a couple buttons, that’s it. The thing that this highlights is that perfection is not achievable and will often end with nothing being collected which is much worse.
One of my favorite quotes on usability was from Jarrett Walker, I can’t remember the exact line, but it went something like “If a map needs a key its too complicated, we should be using maps to tell one story at a time”. The exact opposite of this is why we see things fail. A button here, dropdown there trying to cram everything into one space and making every page do everything. When the reality is we just need it to be simple enough to participate.
The Bottom Line
If your team isn't in the room when you build it, you're building something
that won't last and the frontline workers are your harshest critiques. The agencies that get this right treat their frontline workers not just as users, but as the source of everything the system needs to work.