Development From Within: An In-Service Public Transit Narrative

We identify some of the underlying processes that support decision-making activities undertaken by three public transit stakeholders in Ottawa, and evaluate perceived usability of the proposed technological component of a novel public transit decision-making information system: a database query and results visualization tool (i.e., a cybercartographic atlas prototype). We highlight significant vulnerabilities in existing public transit decision-making processes, including the presence of common biases and heuristics, wherever human judgment is exercised. Our prototype is designed to handle the collection, organization, and visualization of public sentiment (i.e., Twitter data), and [theoretically] uses the Nunaliit Cybercartographic Atlas Framework as the underlying database. In remote usability-testing sessions, we diagnose two system-wide user interface issues that require immediate design solutions and report a mean system usability score of 90.4 with five participants. We discuss the notions of choice architecture and nudging as important design considerations that can improve precision in predictive judgments.