The current payment system public transportation systems use in the Bay Area, Clipper, does a poor job of making things as basic as reloading balances on cards and paying fares convenient and easy.
Leverage BLE enabled smart phones to develop a new payment system to replace RFID cards. By using this new technology reloading value onto accounts can be simplified and boarding times can also be reduced because the need for tagging cards is removed allowing riders to pay by simply stepping aboard a vehicle.
When I orginally envisoned how Adit would work, I wanted there to be as little UI as possible since I felt this would simplify things. Part of UI is audio feedback which can be helpul but can sometimes become annoying which is why I didn’t want there to be any audio feedback when a payment was made. After some discussion and feedback from friends/classmates I made the decision to include a tone since I was finally conviced that this would be less confusing to users.
I sort of over compensated for the earlier mistake of not having enough UI and went way to the other end of the spectrum of having too much and eventually lost the original idea of Adit. Once I got that out of my system I was able to strike a good balance between the two in the second round of visual design and alos give the app some personality.
