Can senior citizens also easily purchase tickets via the Stadtwerke Krefeld (SWK) app? Is the design modern and appealing? Are the selection options overview and helpful? 21 students from The Hochschule Niederrhein (HSNR) have now tackled these and other exciting questions.
The budding business IT specialists took a close look at Stadtwerke Krefeld's mobility app - and examined the usability of the application for different target groups.
What is particularly successful, where is there room for improvement? The five teams also implemented their own ideas: They produced an app prototype based on their ideal concept. They have now presented their results to employees of SWK-IT, who are responsible for developing the app.
For his "Usability" module, Prof. Dr. Boris A. Feige from the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics in Mönchengladbach campus brought Stadtwerke Krefeld on board as a cooperation partner for the first time. This allowed students to apply the knowledge they had learned directly to a real-life practical example.
The conclusion: overall, the teams rated the app as very user-friendly, easy to understand and stable. The groups also agreed that the app makes a very good visual impression. The students highlighted the "subscribe to line" option as a particular added value compared to other local apps with ticket sales.
To increase accessibility, the teams recommended that the font size should be variable in future and that the contrast ratio should be increased in individual cases so that people with visual impairments can read content even better. A suggestion that SWK was happy to take on board.
They also suggested sorting the different ticket options, for example by grouping them together. The effect: expandable categories make the appearance look even tidier.
"I was impressed by how committed the students were to investigating the specific use case of the SWK mobility app. This shows the added value of cooperation between the university and business," says Prof. Dr. Boris A. Feige.
"We are delighted with the great suggestions and feedback from the teams. The great results offer us real added value for optimizing and further developing our SWK app. Some of the feedback in the area of route presentation and accessibility will be implemented in the app. This way, theory can be directly reflected in practical application, which is great," Philipp Sacherow summed up after the students' presentations. The Head of SWK IT has been involved in the project from the very beginning.
Both HSNR and SWK AG agree: the cooperation is to be continued in the next winter semester.
