Cascading information for public transport assistance

Over the last years, public transport has become both more prominent and more diverse. Because of the complex structure of today's public transport networks, an electronic guidance is effectively required. Usually different transport modalities and service providers offer their own application to which the traveler has to adapt after changing between services. Additionally a current trend in mobile applications is the customization of GUI elements which leads to appealing looks but usually also to cluttered presentation of information. Both these problems cause a high cognitive stress on the traveler using the mobile application, especially while conducting other activities at the same time. Our approach to mitigate these issues is to create a mobile application applying the Gamification principle Cascading Information Theory to simplify the usage and additionally to use a back-end which allows to integrate data from various services hereby unifiying the presentation. A prototype of the application was evaluated in an initial user test for comparing our approach to the most popular mobile travel application in Germany.