Alumni Contribute to the YVR Community with Free Transit App
Last year, Communication Design alumni Alvin Kwan and Vince Lo (’11), along with Ben Wu (SFU), decided to get together, pool their talents and come up with a project that would contribute to their community. The catch ─ they had to come up with something with a zero-dollar budget.
A common challenge the trio shared had been their commute to their respective universities via Vancouver transit ─ particularly during the rainy winter season. A review of what is currently on the market revealed that most mobile apps and online resources required a fair number of steps in order to simply find the bus arrival time at a particular stop.
With this issue as the project’s core, they designed and built Commute, an iPhone app that allows users to preset their daily bus routes, quickly track when their next bus arrives (with real-time GPS provided by Translink), and set alerts to plan their departure.
ide from the functionality, the secondary focus of the app was to make it personal. Typically when people search for bus routes, they associate the routes by number or location. With Commute, you can create and use personalized settings to name your routes, i.e., “Home to Work” or “Library to School”. Once users preset their bus routes, all their bus arrival time information is literally one tap away. Users can map bus routes, and, of particular significance for Vancouver, view basic weather descriptions (rainy, cloudy, sunny).
Commute has a simple navigation and design, but Kwan and Lo’s efforts also lie in the details. The pair wanted a unique, friendly and legible typeface to accompany the app. Unable to find something that suited their vision, they set out to design their own custom typeface. Over the course of five months, they created “Uniform” in two weights. And, because we’d expect nothing less from this pair, they went ahead and recorded their own sound effects for button clicks and swipes.
Commute, currently available for the Metro Vancouver area, is now available for free download through the Apple App Store. Plans are underway for expansion to other cities in Canada as well as the Android platform.
Find out more about alumni firm, Studio Faculty.