A twenty person study in Malang moved the journey guidance from phone screen to wrist, and the numbers moved with it.
Using a transit app inside a crowded bus or angkot is harder than it looks. Passengers have to hold a bag, watch for their stop and stare at a phone screen at once. For visitors who do not know the city, that is stressful.
A team from Universitas Brawijaya studied the problem on the public transit routes of Malang. They recorded how twenty participants actually travelled, then built a prototype that moves guidance onto a smartwatch. The watch shows the itinerary, tracks the route in the background and vibrates near a checkpoint.
The same twenty people then ran the trip twice, once with a standard map based phone app and once with the watch prototype. The team recorded trip duration, task completion and user ratings.
The six minute gap is the headline, but the per question results explain it. On not needing to keep monitoring the app, the phone scored 0.70 and the watch 2.65. That is the crowded bus problem in one number: riders stopped holding a screen in front of their face.
Several riders said the hands free interaction reduced their anxiety, and the simpler interface was quicker to learn. Since overall usability scores stayed almost identical, the gain did not come from the app feeling better. It came from where the information sat.
Brata et al. (2021). Usability improvement of public transit application through mental model and user journey. TELKOMNIKA Telecommunication, Computing, Electronics and Control.
The obvious caveat is hardware. Using the design means buying a smartwatch, which not everyone can afford, and the study covers twenty people in one city. The authors present it as preliminary. Even so, it makes a useful point for builders of transit software: the interface is not only what you show, but the device the rider holds while the bus moves.
