About

Transport Cluj Napoca is a mobile application that provides real-time information to public transport users in the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area, making it easy to plan and navigate their journeys. The app offers features such as real-time arrival times, expected delays, and notifications of disruptions on favorite lines, helping users make fast decisions and reducing stress and anxiety.

Location & Date

Cluj - Napoca, Romania, December 2022

Challenge

As part of the EIT Urban Mobility Raptor project, cities from Regional Innovation Scheme countries are seeking startups and SMEs to help them solve critical urban mobility issues. Cluj-Napoca, Romania's fastest-growing city, is facing a challenge with increasing reliance on personal cars for daily commutes, resulting in air and noise pollution, and traffic jams.

The city's objective is to increase the use of the public bus system connecting the city and surrounding areas. A key issue is the lack of reliability and predictability of the current system.

The challenge is to provide users with access to real-time information on schedule changes, wait times, and destination arrival times to increase the use of buses for daily commutes.

Solution

The app is designed to be minimalistic with the goal of being a 3-second app, making it easy for users to find the information they need quickly.

Transport Cluj Napoca is a mobile application that uses an API to access the GPS locations of the buses every five seconds. Based on the bus position, the app predicts the amount of time it will take to reach the next station and shows its exact location on the map.

Key results

During a 5-day demo, the transport mobile app received positive feedback from users, with more than 90% of people interviewed stating they would use the app when it is published. The real-time tracking of buses on the route was identified as the most valuable feature, and the app would be most beneficial in metropolitan areas where bus frequency is lower.

Based on the successful prototype feedback we are planning to launch the first version in the next months.

Main features

• Providing real-time information on bus locations

• Providing an all-day schedule for the bus lines

• Map localisation for busses based on GPS data

Our contribution

This was a product developed end-to-end by X2 Mobile

• Product design

• UX & UI design

• User research

• Mobile & backend development

• QA

• Project Management implied EIT Urban mobility and Municipality stakeholders management.

Tools & Tech Stack

Transport Cluj Napoca was developed using Swift UI (iOS) and Kotlin (Android) native development, Node.js, and Sketch for the UI part.