TransAuditor UX/UI Design

School Transportation Data Analysis Tool
Role: UX/UI Designer
Collaborators: Product Manager, Front-end Developer, Back-end Developer, Jr. Designer

OVERVIEW

The Problem: Planning for, organizing, and improving school transportation is an incredibly complex and difficult problem for school districts large and small. From managing external bus company depots, to planning for children with special needs, to meeting a myriad of legal and budget constraints—creating the best bus experience for kids using the most efficient resources for districts is an interlocking network of challenges. Many districts now collect GPS data on their vehicles but lack tools to analyze the information in a digestible way that would help them make small changes with big impact.

The Goal: With TransAuditor, a new product from Geo Data Intelligence (who has created and sold over 10 products related to GPS data and mapping), our team is building a smart system of "planned vs. actual” KPI metrics to simplify complicated information for Transportation Departments in school districts across the country. No other product like this exists in the market.

USER PERSONAS

User Interviews: To build accurate personas, we conducted in-person interviews and email surveys with Transportation Directors, Routing Analysts, and fleet management staff across both large urban and smaller suburban districts. These conversations gave us a nuanced view of daily workflows, pain points, and long-term challenges. Our insights were further grounded by the expertise of our Product Manager, who spent five years as a Routing Analyst in the Philadelphia School District, bringing firsthand experience of the complexities our users face.

Personas: Our research uncovered three key stakeholders in school transportation: the Transportation Director, accountable for strategy, emergencies, and board reporting; the Routing Analyst, focused on efficiency and safety in daily operations; and the Finance Specialist, ensuring fiscal responsibility and audit-ready accuracy. These personas capture the distinct goals, pain points, and decision-making needs that shaped our design solutions.

Joe—Transportation Director

Oversees high-level routing, garages, finance, dispatch, contractor relationships, and school/parent comms. On-the-go working in the community more than in office.

    • Ensure operational reliability: safe, efficient, on-time transportation for all students.

    • Oversee budgeting, resource allocation, and long-term planning (fleet age, fuel usage, bell times).

    • Provide transparent reporting to district leadership.

    • Constant pressure on On-Time Arrival %, a highly visible KPI.

    • Balancing resources: vehicle assignments, monitors, drivers, and student needs.

    • Political/fiscal scrutiny: budget fluctuations, lawsuits, and community concerns.

    • Monitors dashboards weekly for on-time arrival and operational health.

    • Reviews quarterly/annual reports on budgeting, fleet age, and fuel usage.

    • Delegates tasks to routing, finance, and garage teams but needs top-level summaries for fast decisions.

“I’m responsible for the entire operation: safety, routing, budgets, vendor quality, and making sure buses actually get kids to school on time. I need clear, reliable data to make the right call quickly.”

Mark—Routing Analyst

Manages day-to-day bus routing for ~5,000 students across multiple schools and programs. Works in district office, frequent calls with drivers, and administrators.

    • Ensure student safety (stops are safe, ride times appropriate, correct vehicles & equipment).

    • Maintain operational efficiency (capacity management, stop consolidation, on-time arrival, tiering runs).

    • Provide equitable service, including IEP accommodations and curb-to-curb requests.

    • Manual workload: Constantly adding, moving, consolidating, or removing stops.

    • Daily issues: Handling special requests, last-minute changes, non-emergency disruptions.

    • Complex constraints: Restricted ride-times, limited drivers/vehicles, specialized equipment needs.

    • Reviews routes daily for timeliness and efficiency.

    • Runs in-depth analysis on route segments, depot/school attributes, slack time.

    • Manages quarterly/annual restructuring as student populations and resources shift.

    • Relies on software outputs + manual judgment — wants dashboards that clearly show impact of changes.

“I need to balance safety, efficiency, and compliance all while making sure buses actually run on time. Every adjustment I make impacts students and budgets; I need clear data to make confident decisions fast.”

Heidi—Accounting Specialist

Oversees vendor invoices and district transportation budget, liaising with routing staff and external bus contractors. Creates reports for school executives.

    • Maintain accurate budget projections to support district planning.

    • Compare planned vs. actual services to detect billing discrepancies.

    • Support fiscal responsibility and compliance for audits and board reporting.

    • Manual reconciliation: Without automation, tasks become error-prone and slow.

    • Accountability pressure: Must defend budgets and payments to district leadership and external auditors.

    • Regularly pulls data from TransAuditor for invoice analysis (e.g., TA-29 Bus Contractor Invoicing).

    • Compares contractor charges against routing plan data for validation.

    • Needs clear, auditable records that link financial transactions to operational data (stops, trips, routes).

“I need confidence that what we’re paying contractors for is accurate and aligned with our budget. Board reporting puts our spending under a microscope. I need tools that ensure every dollar is accounted for.”

IDEATION + AI

Flows: With the Product Manager’s general direction and persona needs, I sketched a user journey flow for the TransAuditor product that includes 5 separate, yet integrated modules: Dashboard, Planned Vs. Actual KPIs, Route Tiering Analysis, Route Re-Tiering Process, and Incident Tracker. The 3 modules that I have focused on answering “How might we?” are the Dashboard, Tiering Analysis and Tiering Process. I began my ideation process with hand sketches to see what approaches might best solve for the issues at hand.

AI: With Lovable.dev, I crafted prompts based off of our user personas, product requirements, and my initial user experience ideas to generate solutions. The first drafts were always interesting yet imperfect, so I continued to iterate in Lovable to refine the UX/UI approach. I used Lovable as a sort of playground to generate ideas quickly and mine smart elements for wireframing.

WIREFRAMING + ITERATION

Wireframing: Because our main user will be the Routing Analyst at their monitor, our Product Manager asked me to wireframe the desktop experience first. After researching a variety of non-industry product solutions, sketching, and iterating with AI, I began to craft digital wireframes within Figma for a core group of school transportation aficionados to view and provide feedback.

Feedback + Iteration: Our team meets weekly with a core group of school transportation consultants who were formerly in various roles within school transportation departments. They were very encouraged by the potential impact of the tool and offered valuable insights into what features would be helpful to Route Analysts, what information might need to be displayed rather than nested, and what KPIs different users might want to see most frequently. I implemented those helpful suggestions into the wireframes as I started to move them from initial designs into high-fidelity layouts.

DESIGN SYSTEM

The team selected a component library, Vuetify, and Chart.js to generate visuals for our dashboards and displays. I customized the library’s themes and created additional components needed to execute a product of this complexity. I worked with our Front-end Developer to render charts in the clearest, most useful way for our users.

DASHBOARD DESIGN

Dashboard Design: I designed a configurable dashboard with a user’s most-referenced metrics. This is the main module used by the Transportation Director and Accounting Specialist.

TIERING ANALYSIS DESIGN

Tiering refers to organizing bus routes and schedules into different time “tiers” so that the same buses can be used for multiple runs in a single morning or afternoon. This tool—built for Routing Analysts—uses our team’s carefully configured algorithms to evaluate the efficacy of a district’s current tiering system. I designed an approach that displays routes (the planned path a bus follows to pick up or drop off students in the AM or PM; comprising 2–4 trips), trips (a single instance of operating within a route for one school at one time), and slack time (the downtime between trips) in an easy-to-digest way. Users can filter to choose which routes they want to evaluate and add them to a “cart” to be reconfigured later.

TIERING PROCESS DESIGN

Continuing the Routing aAnalyst’s workflow, this tool takes routes that have been evaluated and deemed worthy of “re-tiering” (breaking up trips from existing routes and reorganizing them to reduce late arrivals, vehicles on the road, travel time for students, and overall costs). This module reduces six weeks of manual work to three or four days. I built a step-by-step process for users who want to re-tier existing routes. After completing the flow, users receive a high-level summary of potential economic and environmental optimizations. For more granular detail, they can view a detailed timetable with the newly suggested routes. This shows route information including SPED requirements as well as seat utilization (students ÷ vehicle capacity). Downtime is differentiated from driving time by shape and color. Users can open a dialog box with a GPS map of the route.

INIITAL RESPONSE

“Your design has literally blown my mind. I think this has the potential to change the industry.”
-Nan D., Chief Product Officer, Geo Data Intelligence

“I know you are supposed to say any qualified designer could come up with a good layout, but I can’t express how happy I am with this approach. You asked thoughtful questions and designed something easy to use, simplifying complex information, smoothing the experience, and creating something beautiful—without having any previous experience in the transportation industry.”
-Chris L., Product Manager, Geo Data Intelligence

“This tool is going to be so helpful for districts large and small, and I love that you can configure it to meet each transportation department’s needs. I can see so many future use cases for this tool beyond the initial ones outlined. If this approach stunk; don’t worry, I would tell you!”
-Jim B., School Transportation Consultant

Product Feedback: Geo Data Intelligence’s account managers have relationships with some of the largest school districts in the country. They are teasing some of the modules to existing clients like the Las Vegas, Houston, Philadelphia, and D.C. school districts to get their initial feedback. So, far those districts have shared their enthusiasm for the product’s potential to make their team’s workflow more accurate and efficient, saving weeks of time and possibly millions of dollars for the district.

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