Design with Open Data
Data is everywhere nowadays, but do everyday people really benefit from it?
By applying service design and human-centered design approaches, how can we create new service concepts enabled by open data to improve people’s everyday lives or create new business opportunities?
keywords: open data, service design, data humanism, data literacy for designersMOVE:
make your move
AUG - OCT 2019Designed with
FELICIA LEE
LEE ZHI YING
BOTTER CHANUnder the guidance of
JUNG-JOO LEE
YUTA NAKAYAMAGuest tutors
ANTHONY HOWE
ERIK CHUAIn collaboration with
GovTechTransportation is an integral part of our life, but it is not uncommon to encounter various frustrations when travelling. Private hire price surges during rainy days or rush hour as well as no public transportation after midnight are common encounters.
Move is a mobile application that integrates data to improve the decision-making process of price-sensitive travellers. It compares prices across private hire companies offering the cheapest ride, uses weather and traffic data to identify price fluctuations and tracks users’ travel expenses.
FEATURE ON
Empowering our decision making process through open data
GETTING
STARTED
Open data is a publicly available dataset from government agencies or crowd-sourcing data made through user participation. Treating datasets like clay and paint, we explore, visualise, and feel the data as design materials. Each exploration begins with a simple question, “what do you want to be?”. As with most exploratory research, we use a mix of deductive and intuitive sensing to mould and shape a combination of data. Different strategies for innovation such as human-driven and data-driven ideation processes are used to make data more meaningful.
CRAFTING
OUR
SERVICE GOAL
After tons of proposals and iterations, we have decided to center our exploration around the one data that struck us as interesting and perhaps often overlooked - weather.
With constant weather changes leading to drastic price and travel time fluctuations, we wonder if open data could help to provide price-sensitive travellers with a more reliable footing in estimating their travel cost.
Leading to our service goal of improving the decision-making process of price-sensitive travellers by layering different sets of data.
KEY INSIGHTS &
OPPORTUNITIES
Using the double diamond principles, and conducting a co-design workshop to understand the various stakeholder needs and their journey map, we extracted the key behavioural patterns of how a traveller plans their journey to save on cost and time. The 4 key patterns are:
Blindly walking out of crowded areas to avoid price surge
Waiting for a price drop
Comparing private hire and public transport prices
Making plans ahead
With that, we see an opportunity to filter and layer data to assist travellers in making more informed decisions through data visualisation and helping them “see” what they initially have to guess blindly.
PROTOTYPING
& FURTHER
REFINMENTS
Upon collecting all datasets from the open-source platform, we use visualising software such as Tableau to experiment with raw data. Low and high fidelity mockups were made and refinements were made based on feedback from the different stakeholders.
DESIGN SOLUTION
Our final solutions provide four main saving features: saving by Planning Ahead, Waiting, Walking and your Tracking Habits.
SERVICE SUSTAINBILITY
To create a self-sustaining data ecosystem, we will apply our algorithm to the integrated data provided by our partners to aid users in their decision-making process. The data collected from our users’ travel patterns and insights can then be sold to our partners.
FEEDBACKS
Many travellers appreciate the features of MOVE in layering data to help people visualise information in a way they never knew was possible. Instead of blindly guessing how and where time and money could be saved, MOVE provides the insights into how one can do so.
We have also received support and encouragement from our tutors and collaborators (Govtech) to bring MOVE into alpha and/or beta-testing. By overcoming certain difficulties in the data collection process, MOVE’s feature could be a useful add-on to existing transportation apps.
Let us know if you are interested to help bring MOVE one step closer to reality.
