Inclusi Maps

The story

As international students, we’ve found the ptv app lacking especially in helping us find our way in train stations. Inspired by our experiences from our home countries, especially Hong Kong’s MTR, we devised Inclusi Map, an interactive kiosk with an accompanying webapp to be placed in train stations to enhance our, and hopefully everyone’s experiences with public transport in Victoria.

Functions and features

A user first lands on the map when they interact with the kiosk. They can view where they are at inside the train station, which is useful especially for larger interchange stations like Flinders or Southern Cross, then input a destination, after which as popup will appear to ask if the user wants to track their journey on their phones with a QR code for them to scan if they wish to do so.

The kiosk has another core function — emergency and non-emergency support. The two buttons on the kiosk are respectively for contacting and requesting emergency services and for support when the user may be feeling unwell or unsafe. This is complemented by night mode, in which the kiosk highlights safer areas, such as roads that are well lit as well as where the user might find security personnel to escort them.

The kiosk has multiple accessibility features, including open captions for announcements, a braille keyboard, the option to increase the UI scale or font size or the contrast, as well as a dial in number to listen to all the information on the screen. The kiosk also is available in multiple languages for users from different multicultural communities.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult for us to think of a product that everyone would find useful, especially since we often do not have the lived experiences of a lot of other intersectional identities (and even if we did, we couldn’t speak for the rest of the community). In the end we decided to draw on our experiences as international students in Melbourne to reflect on what we would want and find useful.