Safe Transit App, TTC Redesign
- Full App Redesign from Scratch
- 4 Team Members
- Hi-Fi Figma Prototype Delivered
In spring 2025, I joined a structured product design mentorship program and spent the term working under a senior mentor alongside two other product designers and a product lead. Our project was a complete redesign of the TTC app — one of the most used and most criticised transit apps in Canada.
The brief was genuinely ambitious: not a refresh, but a ground-up rethink of how a transit app could better serve a diverse urban population, with real attention to accessibility, clarity, and the actual conditions people use transit apps in — moving, distracted, often stressed.
UX research surfaced the core pain points early: confusing navigation architecture, poor accessibility, and an information hierarchy that made simple tasks harder than they needed to be. The team made an early decision to retain only the TTC's brand colours and typeface — everything else would be rebuilt with intention. That decision set the tone for the whole project, because it meant every interaction state, every hierarchy call, every accessibility choice had to be justified rather than inherited.
Working under a mentor with deep accessibility expertise changed how I think about inclusive design. It isn't a checklist or a compliance layer applied at the end — taken seriously from the beginning, it's a constraint that makes the product better for everyone who uses it.
The prototype was presented directly to the TTC. They were genuinely enthusiastic about the work. The reason it didn't move forward wasn't the quality of the design — it was budget. The TTC needed to prioritize engineering safer buses for drivers, following a period of serious attacks on transit workers. That's the right call, and a design team that can recognise when a different problem is more urgent is doing its job.
This project was unpaid and voluntary, and it was one of the most genuinely educational experiences of the past two years — partly because of the accessibility-first process, and partly because of what the outcome taught me about the relationship between good design and real-world constraints.
A strong prototype that doesn't ship isn't a failure. The work was thorough, the feedback was warm, and the decision to prioritise something more urgent was the right one. Knowing how to hold that gracefully, and carry the learning forward without the validation of a launch, feels like its own kind of skill.
“It was an absolute privilege to mentor such a bright and talented team — Olivia, Eloise, Khaosara and Camille. Their proactive approach to feedback propelled the development of the Safe-Transit App, a versatile platform designed to boost transit safety. Their dedication and innovative spirit were instrumental in evolving the initial SafeTTC app concept into a robust urban transit system.”
— Magued Hanna RGD
