FöliGuide was a public transit iOS application for the city of Turku, Finland.

It was developed as part of my bachelor studies at TUAS in cooperation with Föli.

Need

Bus stops in Turku are frequent and often close to each other. Due to this, few to none of them are being announced on the bus. There are electronic displays inside the vehicles, but these are small and often hard to read, especially for visually impaired people. FöliGuide aims to help people locate themselves on their bus journey and avoid missing a stop.

Approach

The app continuously requests the current position of each bus from Föli servers. It then matches this data against the user’s current bus and is thus able to provide the past, next and all upcoming bus stops.

In addition to the core functionality, FöliGuide integrates features to support users dealing with visual impairments. Bus stops can be announced through the phone’s speakers and the app is optimized for iOS’s VoiceOver feature, so blind users are able to navigate through the user interface comfortably.

The app supports user interface and voice feedback in Finnish, Swedish and English.

FöliGuide has been developed as part of a university project in the spring of 2016 and has received several thousand downloads. After users reported compatability issues, it was pulled from the store in 2020.