The Development of Human-Centered Design in Public Transportation: A Literature Review

Public transportation aims to meet the mobility needs of heterogeneous target groups. Therefore, the importance of human-centered methods for the further development of transport and related information services is growing. This paper analyzes the development of the application of human-centered design in the context of public transportation. According to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), a literature review in ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, and Scopus database is conducted. The analysis represents publications from 32 countries or territories globally. As a result, 106 publications with the year of publication between 2004 and 2023 show the growing importance of human-centered methods, such as interviews, observations, surveys, user studies, and prototyping for different application areas in public transport. The results reveal a trend towards quantitative and computational methods in addition to the qualitative user-centered methods for networking information systems related to public transport. This trend is observed alongside the growing implementation of automation systems in vehicles.