Automating Peter Pan's passenger-facing systems

Last night I took a Peter Pan bus from Boston to Hartford, CT. The interior was brand new, and so was the little spiel the driver gave as he pulled out of the gate.

He thanked us and gave us an ETA, directed our attention to a short safety video from Peter Pan corporate, and told us that he'd talk about mobile devices and Wi-Fi afterward.

But he forgot. His speech was never finished, the Wi-Fi was never enabled, and he also forgot to turn off the screens, so the bright DVD menu stayed on for the duration of our nighttime trip.

But I'm not complaining - it was an interesting design case study. Clearly the new bus smell and procedure had distracted the veteran driver enough to miss a couple of steps, but I don't blame him at all. I blame the design of the bus' systems instead, and whoever caused them to work that way.

The bus' Wi-Fi and screens are passenger-oriented systems that are entirely unrelated to what the bus driver should be focused on: driving the bus. I'd argue that the driver shouldn't have to worry about the state of either system, and that they should take care of themselves automatically based on the bus's speed and display input activity.

Unless I'm missing an important component here, it seems like if the bus has been traveling for a few minutes (meaning it's out of the terminal where random people can mooch off of its connection) then the Wi-Fi should turn itself on, and if the A/V system hasn't displayed anything or been controlled after a certain number of minutes, then it should turn itself off. DVD players did this many years ago, and in-bus accelerometers/GPS are far more advanced than they'd need to be for auto-Wi-Fi.

If these errors had been anticipated or spotted during usability testing and fixed, our fancy new bus ride experience could've been close to perfect. Instead, most of us were mildly annoyed by the driver's mistake without considering the actual root of the problem: poor systems design.