Iomob’s Initial UX for Social Distance in Mobility as a Service
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Iomob, a B2B/B2G Mobility as a Service platform decided to embrace the motto “Innovate don’t hibernate!” Instead of heeding the wise words of global experts in the startup ecosystem to just buckle up, potentially shed staff and prepare to hibernate during the crisis, we decided to look for a way to innovate our platform in service of humanity.
We responded to an urgent call from the European Union for startups with technologies that could stem the tide. Our proposal, CORE MaaS (COvid19-REsilient MaaS) is under review by a committee seeking to fast track responses to the call. We obtained global support from 22 amazing organizations in the transport and sustainability arena who immediately understood the potential value of our MaaS platform could have by factoring in social distance into our intermodal algorithms and UX.
Despite the projected faster response time from the EU we decided not to wait so we have started to plan and design what features our MaaS Platform will need to accommodate social distance. First step, today, was considering some UX elements based on our expectations of key requirements. Obviously we will literally go back to the drawing board once we have some enterprise clients committed to deploying Iomob’s CORE MaaS solution (we are already in talks with four in Europe and around the world).
As many media, potential partners and enterprise clients have been enthused by the idea but confused on what we were going to be able to deliver, I feel we should publicly share our early screens developed by our design team. Note: We are super keen to get feedback from the design community, the mobility community and really anyone who wishes to provide us feedback on how to refine our thinking on what functionality and design makes sense to support safer travel for those who must during times like these.
I will not go through our entire UX for full MaaS deployments (over 100 total screens!), nor all the UX we have for social distance but highlight four key functionalities or UX components we expect to incorporate.
- Social Distance Filter. It is quite common for mobility apps, including those Iomob supports, to have filtering functions for things like speed, price and eco-friendly. Here we are intending to add a new filter possiblity for users which is Social Distance.
While this may seem only useful during the current pandemic, Covid-19 has forced the global transportation community to reflect even more about our role in pandemics and other similar scenarios where social distancy should be respected.
How about people with weak immune systems, or people with a contagious illness or disease who want to travel while reducing the risk of infecting other people? What about even claustrophobic or germaphobic people or those wishing to avoid crowds due to perceived or real threats by gender or race?
2. What Constitutes Mobility Services that should be Included as “Safer”?
For users wanting to know what the filter means or how to interpret the symbols they will discover, we have a simple info screen. We believe the nuances of this will need a lot more work and feedback from the community, from our enterprise clients, end users and medical experts too to improve the reliability of our filters.
Here we are thinking of, at a minimum, incorporating into our filters those services that are deeply integrated so that a user can book and pay for the service inside the app without having to interact with a ticketing machine or exchange currency or payment with a driver.
We are also expecting micromobility operators to continue to innovate and add real-time information about the disenfecting of the vehicle (or include disinfecting solution inside the vehicle itself) and those vehicles would be given preferences by our routing engine when users select the Social Distancing filter. We would also factor in if users are required to wear a shared helmet that may have been worn by a previous user.
Finally, we will employ a crowdsourcing tool to allow users of mass transit (rail, bus, metro) to help share knowledge about the real time occupancy levels of these vehicles.
3. Crowdsourcing tool for rating transit occupancy
As mentioned, we will build a simple crowdsourcing tool to ask users to help us determine if a transit vehicle may be too full to accommodate social distance. Those vehicles rated red would not be shown in the search results for users who have opted for the social distance function.
4. Filtered Social Distancing Results
Based on all the above we will provide users with filtered intermodal routing options that support safer journeys within or even between cities (our algorithms accommodate both), combining different modes that are deemed “safer.”
Notice a subtle element of the results. The same bus line (number 7) has two arriving soon. The first one to arrive in 5 minutes has been rated yellow by users (that is it is roughly 20–40% full). The bus that arrives in 10 minutes is rated green. The algorithms prioritise the green option when the user has selected the Social Distance filter. Other options shown to the user, like an e-scooter will have met minimum criteria for safety distance. At the moment we are assuming services requiring a shared helmet would be filtered out of the results so we show micromobility that don’t require helmets.
Conclusion
Until recently the term term social distance was not in the vocabulary of most people, and not in ours either. Those of us in the mobility community are just now coming to terms what Covid-19 means for all of us, how it will impact public transit use in the future, and where transit and mobility will go in the future. (Here is my post from a few days ago reflecting on this). We do not claim to have all of the answers, but we do have strong ambitious to be part of the solution. Please do let us know if you have feedback for us on how to improve our thinking on functionality and UX to embrace this challenge.
Iomob, which stands for the Internet of Mobility, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, has built a white label Mobility as a Service solution which combines proprietary algorithms enabling multimodal combinations of public and private services and an SDK that allows end users to discover mobility services, receive multimodal combinations for their journeys, book and pay for a range of mobility services via our client’s own apps. Iomob has won numerous open innovation challenge awards from organisations like Ford Motors, Renfe and Sweden’s Sustainable Mobility Challenge. Iomob has also participated in prestigious startup accelerators such as Techstars and Wayra and in 2020 won the TravelTech Europe startup first prize (London), 2019 Best Mobility Startup of 2019 at the South Summit, The Public Choice Award from ERTICO in 2019, Top Mobility Startup in the Federation of International Automobiles (FiA) Startup Challenge and selected Top 100 Smart Cities Partners by Newsweek.
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