The ZVV coordinates public transportation in the canton of Zurich, a complex system that operates behind the scenes for most people in their daily lives. One of its digital offerings is a service that generates route and stop maps exactly as they appear on the physical maps found at bus and tram stops.
As part of the service’s modernization, the project team faced a classic but far from trivial question: What’s next? Simply rebuild it? Optimize it? Or completely rethink it? The ergonomists were tasked with answering this question systematically and in close collaboration with the ZVV.
We gathered feedback from the target audience through surveys—conducted directly on the ZVV website and via our own panel of test participants—to determine who uses the tool and for what purposes.
We combined these insights with existing ZVV personas to create a needs matrix. It revealed which needs were uniquely addressed by this service and which overlapped with other solutions in the ZVV ecosystem. This sharpened the focus on what makes the new service unique compared to other ZVV solutions.
In a one-day concept sprint, ZVV and ergonomists collaborated to develop various concepts for the service of the future. We then translated the most promising concepts into a clickable low-fi prototype—tangible and testable, without having to invest in development beforehand.
The result of the project: a clickable low-fidelity prototype that serves as a tangible starting point for the ZVV to gather feedback from internal stakeholders and as a foundation for the next steps in the project.
The project demonstrates how a system’s end of life can become an opportunity: instead of replacing it one-to-one, rethink it with a user-centered approach. The combined research and sprint method quickly provided a valid basis for decision-making.
