A Multimodal App for a Travel Revolution

Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO) is on the forefront of a whole new type of transportation, similar to the Wright brothers with the airplane at the turn of the 20th century. Hyperloop technology has been talked about as “space travel, in a tube, on the ground”. It changes our understanding of distance and time. Regions become neighborhoods, 25 minutes gets you not to a suburb but to another city in nearby state. This has significant implications for work and play. People can live in St. Louis, go to dinner and a show in Chicago, and be back home in time for bed. Compressed commute times change the face of work and home as well: it becomes feasible to work in Seattle, but live in Portland with no increase in commute to the common city - suburbs scenario currently experienced.

In the Fall of 2017, VHO asked Particle to design and develop the initial prototype of a Rider App that would help communicate the concept of a new form of transportation.

Our role

  • UX Strategy
  • Design Workshops
  • UX Design
  • User Interviews
  • User Journey Mapping
  • Roles & Task Flows
  • Visual Design
  • Front End Development

A public transportation model for long distance travel.

On Demand Ridership is something we normally associate with short distance, public transportation. Long distance travel like rail or air, is usually planned and ticket are purchased in advance. VHO flips these ideas on their head. When your region becomes a neighborhood, the transportation system has to behave like today’s neighborhood transportation systems, while actually taking its passengers across long distances. As VHO has been building their demand models and systems for their Hyperloop, they expect a large percentage of their riders to be buying their tickets minutes before taking the trip. Having a system that allows for highly flexible ridership is seen as key to their success.

The UX challenge: guide riders through radically new travel.

How do you help riders understand and take full advantage of the opportunities provided by on-demand, long distance travel in a fraction of the time? Particle worked with VHO to design core experiences that reminds riders of travel opportunities and makes recommendations at key moments to give passengers excellent travel experiences. A critical part of this was designing an interactive map that reinforces the new distance and time shift. By expanding people’s expectations with how distance is represented on maps, the mobile app could make the most of limited screen real estate while highlighting travel experiences for work and play that only a Hyperloop allows for. Similarly, a system that can offer suggestions for relevant, exciting activities in other cities as part of standard search results can motivate people to take advantage of opportunities and begin to incorporate the new travel model into their everyday experiences.

One transportation app to rule them all: A multi-modal, door-to-door, travel experience.

Long distance travel currently requires multiple forms of transportation to complete a trip: a car ride to and from the train station; walking from your home to public transit to get to and from the the airport. Having a single app that brings all options and modes of transit together, including travel times and costs, means that riders can make truly informed decisions for how to get from one place to another, and buy all tickets and fares in one location. Particle worked with VHO to design each experience within the Rider App to highlight the transit ecosystem available to users, while always highlighting the Hyperloop as a key experience within the larger context.

Virgin Hyperloop One is more than getting from A to B. We’re looking to optimize the entire end-to-end passenger experience

Matt Jones
Senior Vice President of Software, Virgin Hyperloop One

AI in a rider app? You bet.

Learning passenger behaviors and preferences and serving up possible experiences at just the right time is key to a multimodal transit app becoming the single app in a rider’s life: you always grab coffee during your commute: yesterday you were taking Hyperloop, so the app directed you to a kiosk in the terminal with the shortest wait time, but today you are taking ride-share the whole way so the app recommends you go to at a corner coffee shop near your house and hail the ride share from there. Serving up these nuanced, contextual experiences at just the right time relies on an intelligent system that processes lots of information into useful opportunities.

Similarly, taking into consideration things like weather, traffic, and other ever-shifting environmental factors and marrying that with user preferences, increases the value of the transit app for its riders. The system might recommend to take a ride share if traffic is bad so you can work on the way since you have back-to-back meetings all day. Or it might recommend walking instead of ride share because it’s a beautiful day and you have a little extra time and didn’t get your run in this morning.

Designing a system that could understand the right times to communicate these factors and offer solutions or recommendations at the right time was a design challenge Particle met head on, through collaboration and exploration with the VHO team. With regional cities becoming neighborhoods, the number of environmental factors greatly increases in any travel scenario, so it was critical to design a system that can help users understand the unique opportunities and value of the Hyperloop in making the most out of travel within and thru dynamic urban areas.

Serving up nuanced, contextual experiences at just the right time relies on an intelligent system that processes lots of information into useful opportunities

Stacey Rutland
Chief Strategist, Particle Design

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