Communication at a Station The city of Philadelphia hosts three main hub stations for SEPTA where a passenger may board trains, subways, or busses. These stations include 30th Street, Suburban Station, and Jefferson Station, shown as the three largest black dots in the center of the map above. At these stations, passengers are exposed to the widest array of communication channels, including in person at a ticket counter, access to printed schedules, audio updates via loudspeaker, and digital displays. It is worth noting that digital displays do provide real time updates related to departure times, but that this information is limited to train lines only. At any of SEPTA's other 279 stations, communication channels are typically limited to loudspeaker announcements, via ticket center during operating hours, and a posted schedule reflecting no real time information.
The fact that real time schedule updates are so limited, both in terms of access at a limited number of stations and for train lines only, is particularly problematic given the ridership statistics reported for fiscal year 2014:
For approximately 88% of SEPTA riders, there is a significant gap in information accessibility.
Communication Via Phone SEPTA provides a customer service phone number that provides access to an in-person phone representative as well as an automated operator that will report scheduled departure times for routes and stops specified by voice command. The automated service is available 24 hours a day, but does not provide real time schedule updates. The customer service representative consulted during this research indicated that on occasion, they can report schedule updates for train lines, but departure times for busses and subways are always reported according to published timetables.
Communication Via Web and App SEPTA currently offers a traditional desktop website experience, a separate mobile web experience, and an app available to both iPhone and Android users. While the app experience is visually a bit updated and organized to push "real time" information to the forefront of the user's experience, there is no significant feature difference between the web and app experiences.
The digital experiences offer as much up-to-date information as a passenger can get at one of the hub stations discussed above. Real time departure information is provided for trains only, under the navigation item "TrainView." This feature is visually prominent in the mobile experience but buried as a sub menu item on the desktop site. An exploratory heuristic analysis of the web and desktop experiences by one researcher indicates the site suffers from a number of issues related to matching labels and language between the system and a user's mental model. TrainView is an excellent example of this mismatch as the label implies some kind of map or visual presentation of the train system.