MARTA Reboot

Have you ever used the MARTA app before? Well, I have and it sure was a struggle. That is why me and my friend have decided to reboot the MARTA app, making it more user-friendly and usable as a whole.

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Inspiration

Personal experience, with the MARTA app has shown me that it could be improved upon, in terms of UX and usability. The need for accessibility to public transport, especially in this day and age is immense, with rises of CO2 emissions and global warming. We decided to set out on a task to bring the MARTA app back to life, with a better experience for the user, change the perception of MARTA to the general public with a new look on the app, as well as incentivize individuals to use public transport.

What it does

Our project is an improvement to the current existing MARTA app, aiming to make it more user-friendly, navigable, and more modern. We saw that the old MARTA app was clunky, old, and did not function well and respond fast. We fixed all of these elements, as well as incorporated a more modern look, which in and of itself is a retro reset :)

This new app promotes a new look for MARTA, emphasizing a more modern, user-friendly appearance, leading to a better perception of MARTA as a whole. We believe that this app could be further developed with direct contact with MARTA, allowing for less restricted access to the APIs and more data being provided.

How we built it

We built this project using React Native and its corresponding libraries. In addition to this we utilized node modules, and worked with a MARTA API to access real-time information. In addition to this we utilized Figma for UX development.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few challenges along the way, mostly due to our lack of experience with React Native. We learnt it from ground-up starting yesterday. In addition to this, understanding the in's and out's of the MARTA API was taxing, due to its unusual structure, as well as errors with the formatting in some part of the API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of what we have accomplished during this project, mostly due to the wealth of knowledge we have gained. The zoomable image view as well as ensuring that the nodes for the stops stayed in the same location, was extremely difficult to create a solution for, especially one that would function on all different screen aspect ratios. However we were still about to accomplish this! The API was also an accomplishment, since learning how to do API calls in JavaScript was quite different than how it is done in Python which I am more comfortable with.

What we learned

We learned a great deal of React Native, as well as understanding more about implementing a map into React and API calls. This project also required us to understand more about the MARTA rail and bus system and how we can best provide this information to the end-user.

What's next for MARTA Reboot

We hope to continue this project, by reaching out to MARTA and actually trying to make this their new app. We unfortunately were limited by our design of the Bus screen, due to restricted access to the Marta Bus API, and we would like to continue working towards making a better MARTA app. In addition to this, MARTA has not made public the latitude and longitude of their bus routes, making it impossible for us to map them at this current point.

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