The official transit website offering real-time updates, routes, and service info for Toronto commuters experiences enhanced.
Role
Client
Duration
Type
Project Background
The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is the backbone of mobility for millions of people in the city — including newcomers, students, and tourists.
As new residents in Toronto, my team and I relied heavily on the TTC’s website to navigate public transportation. But very quickly, we discovered a pattern: critical information was either difficult to find, poorly structured, or buried under dense content with little visual hierarchy.
What should have been a go-to source for timely, accessible transit updates often felt frustrating to use, especially in moments where clarity and speed were essential — like locating real-time service alerts, planning a route, or understanding fare options.
This project was initiated as part of an academic UX research and evaluation assignment. We approached it not as detached designers, but as real users with urgent needs. The problem was personal — and that gave our evaluation depth, empathy, and urgency.
The Challenge
How might we improve the usability and structure of the TTC website so that new or infrequent riders can confidently find the transit information they need — quickly, clearly, and without second-guessing?
Our goal wasn’t to change the visual brand of TTC or create a full redesign, but rather to surface structural and usability issues that directly impact user confidence and decision-making — especially for those navigating the system for the first time.
My Role
This was a collaborative project involving a team of three. While each member participated in all aspects of the process — including research, analysis, and presentation — I was primarily accountable for two core components:
Designing the wireframe improvements that addressed usability flaws and helped restructure content.
Developing and presenting the design recommendations, tying research insights to actionable UX changes.
In short, I was responsible for translating the team’s findings into a feasible and user-centered UX improvement strategy.
Research & Evaluation Process
Our process followed a mixed-method approach grounded in usability heuristics, benchmarking, and scenario-based self-testing.
As recent immigrants to Toronto, we considered ourselves ideal test subjects: real users with no legacy knowledge of the system, relying on the site to make sense of a completely unfamiliar city. This gave us a strong sense of authenticity as we audited the experience.
1. Current State Analysis
We began by evaluating the site’s core sections, including the Homepage, Service Alerts, Trip Planner, Fares & Passes, and Customer Service. Each section was reviewed using Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics, along with basic user flow walkthroughs.
Our findings were immediate and glaring:
The information architecture was overwhelming, with important links hidden under ambiguous labels or duplicated in multiple places.
There was little to no visual hierarchy, causing confusion about what was important and what was secondary.
Users were required to read dense blocks of text to understand even the simplest actions, like elevator outages or transfer rules.
Navigation logic felt inconsistent — for example, the trip planner didn’t show subway options under “public transit,” but oddly included them when selecting “car + transit.”
The biggest takeaway was that the content existed — and in abundance — but was presented in a way that felt more like a government document than a usable digital product. The volume of information became the problem. Instead of empowering users, it overwhelmed them.
Informal User Testing
Though we didn’t have access to formal testing facilities, we performed internal scenario testing to validate our observations
Each of us ran through realistic user goals based on our own experiences, such as:
“How do I check if Line 2 is delayed right now?”
“Where can I find a route from my home to a class using only subway?”
“How do I apply for a post-secondary fare discount?”
These tasks revealed deep flaws in content discoverability. In some cases, it took four or more clicks to access time-sensitive information. In others, we were directed to redundant or mislabeled links that contradicted earlier pages.
We noticed that:
The Service Alerts section grouped subway and bus alerts together in ways that made quick scanning impossible.
The FAQ pages lacked logical categorization, mixing policy, application instructions, and definitions in one long accordion.
The Routes and Schedules section offered maps and downloads — but without any hint as to which format would be most useful, or where to start.
This self-testing validated that our frustrations weren’t just personal preferences — they were real usability failures affecting the site’s core functionality.
Wireframes & UX Recommendations
Our process followed a mixed-method approach grounded in usability heuristics, benchmarking, and scenario-based self-testing.
As recent immigrants to Toronto, we considered ourselves ideal test subjects: real users with no legacy knowledge of the system, relying on the site to make sense of a completely unfamiliar city. This gave us a strong sense of authenticity as we audited the experience.
1. Current State Analysis
We began by evaluating the site’s core sections, including the Homepage, Service Alerts, Trip Planner, Fares & Passes, and Customer Service. Each section was reviewed using Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics, along with basic user flow walkthroughs.
Our findings were immediate and glaring:
The information architecture was overwhelming, with important links hidden under ambiguous labels or duplicated in multiple places.
There was little to no visual hierarchy, causing confusion about what was important and what was secondary.
Users were required to read dense blocks of text to understand even the simplest actions, like elevator outages or transfer rules.
Navigation logic felt inconsistent — for example, the trip planner didn’t show subway options under “public transit,” but oddly included them when selecting “car + transit.”
The biggest takeaway was that the content existed — and in abundance — but was presented in a way that felt more like a government document than a usable digital product. The volume of information became the problem. Instead of empowering users, it overwhelmed them.
Final Presentation
We delivered our findings and wireframes through a comprehensive team presentation. Each team member presented key areas of the research, with me walking through the redesign concepts and justifying each decision through user logic.
The feedback we received from our instructor highlighted the strength of our user empathy, our ability to analyze complexity, and our actionable thinking — particularly in the redesigns.
Reflection & Takeaways
What this project taught me most is that good UX doesn’t always mean more features — it often means less. It means stripping away friction, anticipating needs, and structuring information in ways that feel natural.
As a newcomer to Toronto, I lived through the frustration of needing something as basic as “Where is the elevator at this station?” and being handed a wall of text. That emotional tension — needing something now, and not knowing where to start — is exactly what UX is meant to resolve.
It also taught me the power of hierarchy. A beautifully written page is useless if the most important element is visually buried. Visual order isn’t aesthetic — it’s functional. It’s a map.
Lastly, this project reaffirmed that structure beats content in moments of stress. The TTC site has the information people need. It simply doesn’t deliver it in the right way — and that’s a solvable problem, with design.