The displays in our new buses are confusing.

An analysis and re-design of the display systems in Singapore’s new buses.

Recently my girlfriend noticed the new electronic display in some of the buses and quipped: “Wow, I didn't know we had these displays in Singapore buses. It’s quite cool huh.” I was surprised this was the first time she had seen them because these displays have been spotted in the wild back in early 2018.

For the uninitialised, these are the relatively new Passenger Information Display System (PIDS) which the Land Transport Authority (LTA) rolled out recently. These displays came together with the spanking new MAN buses and they look something like this:

At first glance, this display might be unassuming, it might even earn itself a few praises for being “futuristic” or “user-friendly”. However upon closer observation and scrutiny, one cannot help but frown at some questionable UI decisions the designer made for this product delivered in 2018. Below are some of the points I refuted to my girlfriend for thinking that it was a “cool” piece of software.

Maybe they were going for the depth effect, where the upcoming bus-stop is being shown at the front of the z-axis, with the subsequent stops being smaller and more “distant” from the onlooker’s perspective. But the current design clearly fails to illustrate this perspective at first glance.

Personally, such a display should serve a simple purpose of having highly visible content and displayed in a way for commuters to pick up all the information available intuitively without doing a double take. So here is my take on how these displays can look like instead.

Some points:

Here is how it looks like superimposed:

As a frequent commuter, I feel that this design would be able to alleviate most of the confusion I felt with the current design. But never mind what I think, what do you think? Feel free to leave any comments / suggestions / critiques in the comments below :)

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