Lessons learned from the development of a rural real time passenger information system

Rural communities face a range of challenges associated with accessibility and connectivity (Chamberlain et al 2012). Though real-time passenger information systems (RTPIS) have been long heralded as offering the potential to mitigate some of these challenges their deployment in rural areas has been very limited. In this poster, we utilise evidence gathered from interviews, focus groups, and co-design sessions with British public transport users, operators, government agencies and domain experts to discuss the design process of a rural RTPIS system that aims to improve the rural passenger experience during mobility disruptions, with a special focus on the lessons learned from the process. Our poster will present our design approach, which utilises co-design activities with multiple stakeholders and draws heavily on exploring the interactive experiences in order to elicit and capture a rich texture of participants’ experiences. Figure 1 illustrates various elements of the design. Further, we will present the lessons learned during the design process, and Key recommendations for the design of a rural RTPIS. Lessons learned indicate: I) that a modular design approach aimed at supporting users during the various stages of the journey is needed, and II) that the design approach must include an initial key community of users that can provide a first collection of domain knowledge in a setting that promotes evolution of that knowledge continuously. Key recommendations for the design of the RTPIS system are threefold and include creating: (a) a social dimension for designing new practices and processes, (b) a cognitive dimension for understanding the interference between providinginformation and actively contributing to the development of the system, and (c) a technical dimension for creating new technologies that allow the participants to contribute new information without acquiring extensive technical skills. Our aim, with this work, is to initiate discussions important for both the human-computer interaction and the transport studies communities surrounding the development of mobile RTPIS, and their study in the wild