A new generation solution for an aged problem

Servis Konum is a cross-platform, managing and tracking solution that brings school bus companies and families together to handle primary issues for school transportation. It mainly aims to create a flawless operation flow while saving time for both sides, increasing the security and reducing the problems which occur due to miscommunication.

There is no solution before knowing the actual problems

My role in this project was product design and UI/UX design. So first of all I started with locating the main problems. I had a chance to do interview with families, students and officials of transportation companies like drivers, managers and hosts who act as assistants of drivers during the journeys. After 52 total interviews, we have established the fundamental problems. These are:

• Timing flaws: Students and/or school buses don't appear at the pick up points on time for so many different reasons.
• Miscommunication: A healthy and continuous communication between families and company officials is highly important. But that is barely possible. Also unsupervised and unstandardized communication always has potential of causing confusion.
• Security issues and concerns: Lack of public and live tracking information causes concerns in families, especially if unexpected delay occurs like an extreme traffic jam.
• Mislocated pickup points: Pickup points are vital for drivers and companies to create the fastest and most hassle-free route. Therefore any last minute changes of pickup points simply causes a mess.
• Exceptional absence cases: Absence situation should be stated in advance by families. So companies and drivers can create a new temporary route. But at some situations, the time is unappropriate to directly contact with the company or officials. Also alternative ways of communicating are still unofficial and unsupervised.

Two sides, one solution

At this point, our solution in mind was to create two apps that connects drivers and families not only for proper communication, but also for collecting and presenting live and supervised tracking data which will be stored on our servers for every single journey. Also, these apps should be cross-platform for both Android and iOS users. To reduce the production time, we chose PhoneGap as our development environment using C# base and started specifying and designing the fundamental functions for both apps.

For the driver app

• Sending live location tracking using GPS
• Up to date students lists and exact pickup points for every student on the map
• Route advice
• Out of route alarm for unauthorized route changes
• Attendance check obligation before school to home delivery starts
• Always up to date family contact information with back up options for emergencies
• Announcements through push notifications
• Information about weather and traffic conditions
• Estimated route completion time or pick up point arrival time

For the family app

• Live tracking
• Tracking and communication history
• Option to update contact informations
• Option to inform about an absence in seconds
• Always up to date driver and host contact information
• Announcements through push notifications

Getting dirty to learn and experience

We started with the driver app and let the families who have accepted to join our beta test to use our tempory web interface. What I learned at this stage is:

Families need a reminder like a push notification or text message to understand that the school bus is nearby or started to the route. Also, they want to be informed in advance before the driver arrives to pickup point, so kids have some time to get prepared.

Some drivers forget about running the app before starting to the journey. Also, wifi has a big role for having a proper location information through GPS, but they generally forget to turn it on. Sometimes, that causes the submission of irrelevant location data. Another issue about drivers is the lack of fluency in using new technologies or smartphones, apps.

Easy to tell, hard to implement

To get over all these issues, we revised the driver app to force to turn on the wifi and implemented the text notification service as a reminder of turning on the app before the upcoming journey. Also, for families, we created an information service that sends an automatic text message to their contact number with approximate distance, when the transport is in their area for picking up. This gave enough time to get ready for families and kids.

For drivers, we have prepared an introduction video and put it at the help section of the app. But again, surprisingly it was not enough. So we decided to be old school. We printed hard copy manuals to let them to check anytime they need. And guess what? Worked like a charm. Also, we have created a help button for them to reach us for technical assistance in the field. Once they use the help button, system automatically picks a technician and send a text message with the contact information and location of the driver.

Happy endings are priceless

After all of these updates, the driver app was a great success. We collected reviews from both drivers, companies and parents to understand if we are still on the right track or not. %95.8 of our beta group of drivers reported that their total pickup and delivery times reduced dramatically. But best of all, miscommunication between them and parents were almost none and the stress factor was gone.

After we had completed the driver app, we continued with the parents app. It was an easier and hassle-free process as it just contains CRUD operations. To reduce the costs text messaging costs, as a last-minute addition, we added the push notification option to parents app to let them to get warnings and informative messages from the system.

Thank you for this amazing journey

Servis Konum created a way of better and more secure way of transportation for thousands of families and drivers for almost 5 years. After this long journey, Servis Konum has been acquired in 2019 and moving on his journey under another beloved company's roof which is the leader of transportation technology market in Turkey.