Departure Board, by design, is a very simple application. The design philosophy for the application is a departure board that loads instantly based on your location.
The idea came to me in 2012 during my weekly return commute from Merseyside to the Furness peninsula in Cumbria. It frustrated me that whilst enjoying a coffee or sitting in one of the lounges, I had to keep moving to see the departure board. I checked every train app in the App Store and they all solved this problem. However, they require many taps to load the local departure board; by the time, I had done this (3-10 seconds), it’d be easier to just go and look at the board in the station. I saw this as an opportunity to make a new train application, that loads the local departure board instantly.
To fulfil this opportunity with sufficient differentiation from what was on the market, I challenged myself to make an application that can load the local departure board in under a second. I hoped this would be achievable as the process is straight forward:
1. Retrieve the user GPS coordinates;
2. Look up the local station;
3. Retrieve the departing train information from a suitable API;
4. Parse the information;
5. Display it to the user.
My main concern were with how fast step 1 and 3 would be. If it took longer than one second to load the board, I felt that the design philosophy would not have been acheieved.