Mobility · Product Design · 2019

Commute Architect

Led product design for Shuttl's core booking experience — a commute operating system for over a million daily riders across India's most complex corridors.

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01

Problem

Transit Trust Deficit

Commuters needed reliability, not features. Every screen had to earn trust before asking for commitment.

1M+Daily rides at peak
02

System

Booking as Ritual

Designed the daily commute loop — discover, book, ride, repeat — with zero cognitive overhead.

4Cities launched
03

Process

Field-First Design

Rode routes, shadowed ops, prototyped in vehicles. Design grounded in real commute friction.

12Weeks to ship
04

Outcome

Daily Habit Product

Shuttl became the default commute choice for professionals who could afford reliability.

40%Booking completion lift
Client
Shuttl
Engagement
Product Design Lead
Duration
12 Weeks
Primary Outcome
1M+ Daily Rides
Stack / Tags
Mobile · UX · Ops

Artifacts from this engagement

ProblemChallenge BriefConstraints and context before the engagement ProcessEngagement PhasesHow the work was structured and delivered SystemSolution ArchitectureWhat was built and how it works OutcomesResults & MetricsMeasurable impact and learnings
Urban Mobility / App / B2C

Commute
Architect.

Led product design for Shuttl's core booking experience — the app that became the daily ritual for over a million Indians navigating Delhi, Gurgaon, Bengaluru, and Pune's most complex commute corridors. Not a transit app. A commute operating system built for people whose relationship with time, reliability, and personal space is shaped by decades of public transit failure.

0
Daily Rides at Peak
4
Cities · 200+ Routes
4.7★
App Store Rating
2020
Year Completed
Client
Shuttl
Role
Product Design Lead
Timeline
12 Weeks
Outcome
1M+ Daily Rides
03
Section 01
The
Problem.
A product with the right idea, the wrong execution, and users who had already decided public transit couldn't be trusted.
A Good Product.
For the Wrong User.

Shuttl had product-market fit in theory — an AC bus service with reserved seats on fixed routes, aimed at India's working professional class. The hypothesis was right. The execution had been designed by a team whose mental model of "commuter" was a Bangalore tech worker in their 20s who was comfortable with apps, okay with uncertainty, and treated commuting as dead time to fill.

The actual Shuttl user was different. She had spent years navigating DTC buses that never arrived on time. He had a 7:45am standup he could not miss. They needed an app that felt like a contract — that said "you will be at this stop at this time, in this seat, and nothing about that will surprise you." The product was selling efficiency. The user was buying certainty.

01
Booking flow required 7 steps for a daily repeat action — returning commuters had to re-enter the same origin, destination, and time every single day. There was no concept of commute memory, favourite routes, or quick re-booking. The product treated every trip as a first trip.
02
Real-time bus tracking was buried and unreliable — the most anxiety-reducing feature in any transit app — "where is my bus right now" — was two taps deep and updated every 90 seconds. For a user standing at a stop in winter at 7am, 90-second-old location data is not reassurance.
03
No seat preference system — reserved seating was Shuttl's core differentiator over auto-rickshaws and public buses. But all seats were treated as equivalent. Users with strong preferences — window seats, front of bus, away from engine noise — had no way to express or remember them.
04
Cancellation experience was punishing — changing plans is a normal part of life. The cancellation flow was three screens deep, required explanation, and had a 30-minute pre-ride cutoff that was not communicated at booking time. Users who missed the cutoff lost credits and lost trust.
04
Section 02
The
Process.
12 weeks. Commute shadowing before any screen design.

Ride the
Routes First.

No commute product should be designed by someone who has never stood at a Gurgaon bus stop in August, watched the estimated arrival tick from 4 minutes to 8 minutes, and felt the specific anxiety of not knowing whether to wait or hail an auto. The research started there.

Key Insight · Week 2 · MG Road Corridor · Gurgaon
Users were not buying a seat on a bus. They were buying the feeling of knowing exactly what their morning will be. Certainty is the product. Everything else is feature.
01
Commute Shadowing
Weeks 1–3

Rode 40+ routes across Delhi, Gurgaon, and Bengaluru at peak hours. Interviewed 60 regular Shuttl riders at stops and on-board. Mapped the emotional arc of a commute — from the alarm going off to sitting at a desk — and identified every moment where the app either reduced or amplified anxiety. The 7am stop in Cyber City became the design reference point for every subsequent decision.

02
Commute Persona Framework
Weeks 4–5

Developed three commuter archetypes grounded in research rather than demographics: the Schedule Anchor (needs certainty above all, uses Shuttl as a daily contract), the Flexible Regular (books day-before, values ease over exactness), and the Occasional User (low investment, high friction sensitivity). Every feature decision was evaluated against all three.

03
Core Flow Redesign
Weeks 6–9

Rebuilt the booking flow from seven steps to two for returning commuters. Introduced commute memory — the app learns your route, your preferred seat, your departure time, and surfaces them automatically. Redesigned the live tracking screen to be the primary post-booking state rather than a buried feature. Built the seat selection system with preference persistence across bookings.

04
Anxiety Reduction Layer
Weeks 10–12

Designed the proactive notification system — the app now tells you the bus is 5 minutes away before you need to check. Redesigned the cancellation flow to be one tap, prominently surfaced, with the cutoff time shown at the booking confirmation stage. Added a "bus is running late" communication system that removed the most common support query entirely.

05
Section 03
The
Solution.
Four design decisions that turned a booking app into a daily certainty machine.
01
01
Commute Memory System

The app learns each user's commute pattern — route, seat preference, departure time — and makes re-booking a single tap. The returning commuter's first screen is a personalised commute card, not a blank search form. Seven steps became two. Daily friction became near-zero.

02
02
Real-Time Certainty Interface

Live tracking moved from a buried sub-screen to the primary post-booking state. Bus location updates every 15 seconds. ETA shown in minutes, not times, because the user is not watching a clock — they're watching a countdown. The stop arrival moment is celebrated, not ignored.

03
03
Seat Preference Persistence

Seat selection remembered across every booking. Window seat preference, front-of-bus preference, proximity to door — all persisted and surfaced automatically. The seat map became a visual identity element for each commuter, not a functional choice made fresh every day.

04
04
Proactive Communication Layer

The app tells you things before you need to ask. Bus departing in 10 minutes — leave now. Bus running 7 minutes late — here's your updated ETA. Cancellation window closing in 15 minutes — still need it? Proactive communication reduced support contacts by 38% in the first month.

Commute Architect · Three Core Screens · Booking / Tracking / History
Good Morning.
Your commute · Sector 29 → Cybercity
Sector 29 Metro Gate 2
DLF Cyber Hub
Cybercity Phase 2
Seat 8A · Window · 07:45
Book
Bus Arriving
SH-1042 · Sector 29 → Cybercity
4min
ETA at your stop · Updated 8 sec ago
Seat 8A · Window · Your seat
This Week
Commute summary · 5 rides
Mon
34 min
Tue
37 min
Wed
33 min
Thu
41 min
Fri
36 min
Avg commute 36 min · On-time rate 94%
Fig. 01 — Quick re-book (commute memory), live tracking with 15-sec refresh, commute history. Three moments that define the daily ritual.
06
Section 04
The
Outcome.
What changed — in retention, in ratings, and in how a million people start their day.
1M
1
M+
Daily Rides
Peak daily ride count post-redesign launch
42
0%
D30 Retention ↑
30-day retention improvement from baseline
38
0%
Support Contacts ↓
Reduction in "where is my bus" support queries
4.7
4.7
★
App Store Rating
Up from 3.9 pre-redesign
✦
Booking time for returning commuters dropped from 90 seconds to under 8 seconds — the commute memory system made the daily re-book nearly instantaneous. Users who had previously found the app "fine but a bit slow" started describing it as "the one thing that just works in the morning."
✦
Seat preference uptake reached 84% of active users within 60 days — the feature wasn't prompted or pushed. Users discovered it through the booking flow redesign and adopted it naturally. The seat map became a personal element of the commute identity, not a utility feature.
✦
App Store rating moved from 3.9 to 4.7 within 90 days of the redesign launch — the rating improvement was driven almost entirely by reviews mentioning reliability, predictability, and "finally feeling like it gets me." The emotional vocabulary of the reviews mapped directly to the certainty framework that shaped the design.
✦
The redesign became Shuttl's primary acquisition narrative — "Shuttl is the app that knows your commute" became the marketing positioning. Product design became brand strategy. The certainty framing the UX was built around turned out to be the value proposition the growth team had been searching for.
"

We built a bus booking app. Raghvendra showed us we'd built the wrong thing — and then helped us build the right one. The insight that our users were buying certainty, not a seat, changed how the entire product team thinks about what we're doing. The 1M rides number is the proof. The 4.7 rating is the feeling.

Head of Product
Shuttl · 2020
07
Section 05
Key
Learnings.
What designing for India's commuter permanently changed about how B2C mobile products get approached.
01
01
The Emotional Contract is the Product.

Shuttl users weren't buying transportation — they were buying a promise. The redesign succeeded because it was built around that promise, not around feature completeness. Every screen answered "is this promise still holding?" rather than "is this function accessible?" That reframe changed everything from information architecture to notification timing.

02
02
Habitual Products Deserve Habitual Design.

Most apps are designed for occasional use — where discovery, onboarding, and explanation make sense. Commute apps are used twice a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. That frequency changes everything. The returning user's first screen should never be the same as the first-time user's first screen. Commute memory wasn't a feature — it was a respect for the user's time.

03
03
Anxiety is a Design Surface.

The commute journey has specific anxiety peaks — the wait at the stop, the 3-minute warning before departure, the moment you realise the bus might be late. Most apps ignore these moments. Designing explicitly for anxiety reduction — proactive notifications, frequent location updates, transparent delay communication — delivered more product value than any new feature in the roadmap.

04
04
Context Research is Not Negotiable.

The MG Road corridor insight — that users were buying certainty, not seats — was not discoverable through any research method other than standing at a bus stop in Gurgaon in August and listening. The distinction between what users say they want in an interview and what they actually need at 7am on a Tuesday is a chasm. Only field research bridges it.

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