Company: Arrival
Project: interior and exterior bus screen design
Role: Lead designer
Responsibilities: User experience, visual and motion design
Team: Lead designer (x1), Product designers (x1), Product owner (x2)
Challenge
Every city is different, so the Arrival bus can be tailored to local needs. Arrival’s modular bus design enables configuration of length, range and capacity with a human-centred design made for passengers, drivers, fleet operators, cleaning staff, pedestrians, cyclists and urban residents.
This new generation of buses feature state-of-the-art wrap-around LED screens for displaying direction, passenger information, and advertising, all managed through a digital application.
Our challenge was to design a seamless and elegant user experience concept for interior and exterior screens that aligns with Arrival's design principles (minimal, mindful, and magical) and our user experience design framework ARC (Astonishingly crafted user experience, permanent, and 100% functional).
Solution
We began by researching signage design used in public/office space to create an inspiration mood board in line with our design principle and brand vision.
We then developed bus journey maps with information that should be displayed at different stages of the journey, and visual maps of interior and exterior bus screen locations, including technical information such as screen resolution and refresh rate.
Based on these, we explored visual and motion design in Figma and After Effects that we reviewed and improved through continuous testing using a 3D bus simulator/VR environment, and iterations with the bus program, product and engineering leads.
The screen designs were tested on real screens before being used for the First Bus trial in Leeds in September 2022.
