SEPTA has rolled out a new version of its smartphone app that aims to make it easier for riders to quickly find the most convenient bus, train, or trolley for their trip and make travel decisions on the fly.
The new iteration of the application for iPhone and Android devices debuted last week, replacing an older version released in 2017.
The app has already drawn both praise and criticism for working somewhat differently than its predecessor. But given shifts in commuting patterns in recent years, and travelers’ needs for easy access to real-time arrival information, the app’s designers say they think SEPTA’s 760,000-plus daily riders will appreciate it once they give it a try.
“A big priority was making sure that when you open the app, you can see and understand really quickly the full breadth of options that are available to you,” said Lex Powers, SEPTA’s director of service information design. “Not just the station that you know or the nearby bus route that you know, but everything that is available and accessible to you, sometimes even within just a few blocks.”
More updates are on the way, including a tweak to the way Regional Rail departure times are presented, said Katie Monroe, the agency’s project manager for service disruption communications. Eventually the detour maps that recently debuted on SEPTA’s website will also be available in the app.
Multiple points of entry
The new app has many of the same functions of the old one, or near equivalents.
On the home screen, users can tap “Nearby” to see a map and listing of surrounding transit lines, including arrival times for the next couple vehicles. When you tap a route icon on the map, the route appears as a dark line, with arrows showing vehicle locations.
That Nearby tab partially replaces the TransitView function in the app’s previous incarnation. Users can pan the map to a different spot and reload it to see that area’s routes.
Alternately, riders can go to the Schedules tab, use menus to select a line, and go to the map to see routes and vehicle locations. That’s similar to the old Next-to-Arrive tab.
Or, from the home screen, they can start typing in a name, like “City Hall” or “Ardmore,” pick from the destinations that pop up, and get a list of lines and stops with departure times. That’s essentially the old Trip Planner function.
“In the old app, it bumped you out to the web Trip Planner, and this is fully integrated into the app experience,” Monroe said.
In general, the app was redesigned to be easier for casual users, like people who are on a one-time trip, to start using with minimal effort, Powers said.
“The way that people use transit today is a lot different than the way that they used it 10 years ago, in that people are a lot less likely to take the same trip every day, to repeat the same trips all the time,” he said.
The team’s research showed that using the old app well “required a high level of knowledge about the SEPTA system,” Power said. “It was good if you already knew what you wanted to do, and you wanted to keep tabs on your favorite train or your favorite arrival. It’s just that the priority now is to be more accessible, to have a lower barrier of entry.”
Favorites all over the place
Daily commuters need not despair, though. The revamped application actually expands the “Favorite” or heart function used by frequent riders to quickly bring up the information they need.
Much like in the old app, users can navigate through menus in the Schedules tab to find a route — e.g., “47 Whitman Plaza to 5th-Godfrey” — and favorite it by tapping the heart symbol.
They can also enter an origin and destination in the Trip Planner, and then favorite and name the results, for example as “Morning Commute.” The next time they tap the name on the home screen, it will show all the route options for the trip, with real-time arrival times.
Users can also find a station on the Nearby map, or in the Schedules tab, and favorite it there to create a link to a list of upcoming departures.
“There’s a Favorite screen that the app will default to when you open it, if you have any Favorites saved,” Monroe said. “So it should be very, very quick for people to get to the things that they have saved.”
Other features include a Help tab to contact SEPTA police, as an alternative to the separate Transit Watch app, or to contact customer service. (You can also still use Transit Watch.) An Account tab lets users buy and manage Key Cards and Key Tix.
Monroe said the development team “greatly improved” the app’s accessibility features. It uses tools built into iPhones and Android devices to read the contents of the screens and help visually impaired riders find the info they need.
The app uses the new route names and signs that SEPTA is introducing across the system, for example by renaming the Market-Frankford Line the “L” and the Broad Street Line the “B.” That rollout “is about to accelerate to an extreme degree” and the new app should help people get used to it, Powers said.
The new app is meant to compete better against rivals that provide the same basic real-time information, such as the popular Transit App, Google Maps and Apple Maps. CapTech, the contractor that built the app, says it’s been downloaded 160,000 times so far.
The upgrade is also part of a larger set of customer experience improvements that include the new wayfinding system, a new website, a solution for the “ghost bus” problem, and changes to detour notifications.
Change can be hard
Some early adopters of the new app praised the update. One Reddit user described it as “clearly more polished and thought out” than the previous version. Another, who recently moved to Philly, describes the old app as “terribly organized for someone unfamiliar with SEPTA,” and said they liked the new search bar, which eliminates the need to peck through multiple menus.
A few people appreciated the elimination of an occasional pop-up asking the user to download updated schedules. That now happens automatically, without the user needing to do anything.
Several riders said the app repeatedly crashed; Monroe said that was caused by a bug primarily affecting some iPhone users, which was patched in an updated version.
The bulk of the complaints were from longtime users who were were irritated that their old Favorites were deleted and had to be recreated — Monroe said that was unavoidable, due to a change in the app’s underlying structure — or that the new app seems to have lost key features or made them hard to find.
“I liked the Live View of the buses to see exactly where they are and now it’s like jumping through hoops just to get to a live map view for some reason???” one person wrote. “The UI looks aesthetically nicer but why do I find it even harder to navigate lol.”
Those types of comments are common when SEPTA changes the way it provides information to customers, Powers said.
“We went through something similar with the website, where we took away Transit View and Train View, but we’ve replaced them with tools that have a lot of the same functionality, just under different names,” he said.
A FAQ section of SEPTA’s website addresses a few of the top issues users have asked about since the new app came out.
Respite for Regional Rail riders
One major complaint came from Regional Rail riders who now see a countdown, e.g., “Departure: in 28 minutes,” for the next train rather than a clock time like “Departure: 11:40 am.”
Some said the new format made it hard to tell when the train would actually be there, for example when there’s a shifting delay, and had led them to miss their trains.
The new app adopted the countdown format across modes of travel, but it’s become clear that clock times are especially useful for Regional Rail riders who identify their train by its departure time, Powers said. An update is coming this week that will revert the rail info to clock times, he said.
A few people were also unhappy that the app no longer allows real-time tracking of multiple routes, and doesn’t show multiple route lines and vehicles on a map at once.
SEPTA’s website still offers that functionality, and the designers said they’ll consider bringing it to the app in the future.
“Please, continue to give us feedback on the app,” Monroe said. “We are tracking all of those things, and keeping track of how often we hear these complaints, and looking at improvements that we can make.”
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