Wayfare

Instead of testing on a desk we printed screens at phone size and walked participants down an actual platform, holding the paper at arm's length while they moved. Anything below sixteen points was unreadable inside three seconds. Two of our early layouts collapsed instantly, which was worth more to us on day one than any amount of discussion.

The final design shows exactly one thing: your next physical action, in type large enough to read at a glance, with the platform number as the largest element on the screen. Time to departure sits underneath as a countdown rather than a clock time, because subtraction is the last thing anyone wants to do while running. The full route is available but it takes a deliberate swipe to reach.

The whole transfer sequence caches when you begin the journey, so the screen keeps working underground. When live data is stale we say so plainly with a timestamp rather than silently showing old numbers, which was the failure mode that annoyed our testers most about existing apps.

We extended the type scale and arrow language to platform signage so the phone and the station agree with each other. Matching the colour coding to the existing metro line palette meant the concept could be read by anyone who already uses the network, which is what the judges singled out.