Commuterific

We all had different perspectives about our commutes into Chicago. Whether for work or play, we all had one core concept in common: the time on our commute was an opportunity for distraction. Getting deep in thought, reading books, listening to our own music, or taking a quick snooze: making the most out of a commute would often lead to missing the cues for our transit stops.

We knew we wanted to build some means of informing us we needed to hop off transit, with enough time to gather our books, music, or conversation. The app we would build needed to give us enough time to shake our distractions without introducing additional stress into our commute habits.

In this project, we took a stab at a number of new areas. Geofencing, material design, animations, and building promotional spots. The most difficult technical or creative challenge we faced was related to the Matryoshka-style geofences that trigger different events, and ensuring those events were accurate. For example, when traveling in Chicago’s Loop, we could be in proximity of our subway stop, but it would sequentially still be a distance away. To ensure that our method of solving this problem proved useful for other users, we built a feedback tool to give the users a chance to indicate if Commuterific fired off too early or too late.

Commuterific is a proximity alarm, designed to inform us when it’s time to depart transit without introducing more stress into our commute.

We introduced Dozer, Commuterific’s mascot, into the application as a cute and fun visualization of a stress free commute. While the app is simple and efficient, we’ve received more complements on the artwork for Dozer than use of the application.

Commuterific was offered on Android and iOS.