What?
In North America, bus drivers had to physically visit their depots and manually select their routes and working hours from hundreds of bus lines displayed on the walls of a depot. Hybrid Bidding, in Optibus' Driver App, aims to digitize this entire process. My job was to translate complicated bureaucracy into straightforward, bus driver language.
Drivers have a specific time frame to choose their roster, extra task and confirm all their choices.
— PROJECT NAME
Hybrid Bidding (Optibus Driver App)
— ROLE
Content Design
UX Writing
Product Strategy
— DATE
2025-2026
Hybrid means that drivers are supposed to choose a combination of rosters, extra work, and have the chance to volunteer for even more work. (I am exhausted already.)
I partnered with Product Managers, Designers, and Developers to understand the technical constraints and how to make the very long process of choosing work hours in a specific time-frame more palpable.
Conversational toasts for smaller cognitive load
My main concern was keeping the tone of voice positive and conversational, like a friend guiding the user. Together with the design team, we decided to add tooltips and contextual hints to the more complicated pieces of the flow.
Friendly hints for complicated flows
Another huge hurdle was that every client had different wording for different types of work. While some organizations used the word “spare”, others could use “floater”. After several discussions with clients and my Project Manager, I managed to standardize the terms and create a universal taxonomy that allowed the Driver App to be used all across North America.
Dialogs to avoid errors and be absolutely sure
This framework became the single source of truth for design and content for all future bidding types, including Vacation Bidding, Roster Bidding, Spare Lines, as well as other bidding features such as using Favorites to focus on… Well, the drivers' favorite rosters.
You can read more about it here.