I just spent a week in Kansas City with Zūm. We’re launching there, and the buses were out on dry runs.
The point was empathy. It’s hard to design for people whose day you have never seen, so I went to see it. One morning I was at the yard at dawn.
I rode along on the morning and afternoon dry runs and talked with drivers, monitors and dispatch.
Experienced drivers don’t use our app to navigate. They know the roads and mostly look at the list of stops. They want to see the school’s name, not a street address, and to know which side of the road the kids will be waiting on.
One driver said the tablet is way more work, and that they’d rather have turn-by-turn directions on paper. The tablet isn’t always charged at the start of a shift, and the stand keeps falling.
On the afternoon run I sat with a monitor who has worked with special-needs kids for years. She cares a lot about the kids, helps her driver through tight spots and backing up, and likes staying with one driver.
At dispatch, drivers and monitors are paired on a spreadsheet. Monitors walk in and ask, “Is my driver here?”
Small things add up. A stop the app plans as two minutes often takes five or six, and the whole ride runs late.
I came home with pages of notes. Next, I want to turn them into changes: school names instead of addresses, which side of the road the kids are on, and real tablet training for drivers.