Ironhack’s prework: Design thinking—challenge 1
This is my first challenge for the prework of Ironhack’s UX/UI Design Bootcamp. In this study case you will find:
- An introduction to Citymapper (The app to be worked on)
- The problem and the challenge I have to tackle
- The design thinking process
- The Conclusion
Citymapper app
Citymapper is a public transit app for cities that displays transport options, usually in real-time, between point A to point B. It integrates data for all urban modes of transport, including walking, cycling and driving, in addition to public transport. It is free of charge and is available through mobile and web app.
The app was founded by Azmat Yusuf in 2011 and was first available in London. Soon after it was brought to many other cities.
Citymapper keeps updating itself and adding things that might be of interest to the user, such features include Covid test centres and issues disrupting the public transport system.
The problem and the challenge
Does Citymapper cover everything in regards to the transportation needs of its users?
It surely solves some of the main problems of urban mobility, but there is one particular point that many users have issues with: the different amount of public transport tickets the users have to purchase.
Every country has a different transportation system and with that, different tickets, purchasing methods, ticket validating rules and different durations where each ticket is valid for.
With this in mind, I would like to suggest a set of features that if included in Citymapper would solve these issues.
Design thinking process
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” — TIM BROWN, EXECUTIVE CHAIR OF IDEO
— Empathize
Before we can begin any research or design sketches, there are some questions we need to ask ourselves to understand better, not only the product but also who we are designing for.
- What problem are we solving? — Once the user knows what transportation method to take, they need a simple way to purchase any tickets needed for this form of transport.
- Who is your audience? — Anyone who uses a smartphone regularly to navigate the public transport system of a city — Age 15–65.
- Who is your client’s competition? — Google Maps, Moovit, Maps.me, Omio and UrbanGo.
- What’s the tone/feeling? — Citymapper has a casual and fun tone/feeling. With its playful graphics and simplistic design, it makes the user feel relaxed and in control at all times.
To better understand the user-base, I conducted interviews with 5 people between the ages of 22 to 35, living in Berlin and using public transport, e-scooters and bikes as their main form of transportation.
The following questions were asked to each participant:
- How do you normally travel around the city? (Bus, train, bike, e-scooter?)
- What app (or apps) do you use for directions?
- How often do you travel to other cities?
- What app do you use while travelling in other cities?
- When using public transport in a different city how do you pay for tickets?
- Is there anything that bothers you from the app(s) you use? What’s missing?
— Define
Some of the problems discovered from the interviews were as follow:
- They use different apps depending on their mode of transportation/environment. For example, Citymapper does not include routes for driving so users would rather use another app in this case. Participants also mentioned they would use maps.me if they were in a situation where they had no internet.
- It’s hard to know what tickets to buy, where and how to use them. Asking for help on this matter in a foreign language can also be difficult.
- None of the apps offers a way to purchase the tickets. If buying online, the user needed to download many different apps depending on the city they were in.
Problem statement
The user main problem is the lack of information about the process of buying the tickets (how, when, where), not being able to have it in digital form.
— Ideate
The broad goal is to allow users to buy tickets through the app. Based on this here are some solutions:
- Display cost and ticket, when the user clicks to buy opens a deeplink to transport company purchasing app (e.g BVG)
- When the user clicks to buy it opens a web view with the transport company website– this solution would work without the user having the transport company’s app downloaded.
- Similar to Omio, the user can purchase and store their tickets directly in the app for any transport company.
— Prototype
For the prototype, I designed some wireframes to indicate how the user can buy the ticket and where the ticket is going to be storage after they bought it.
— Test
Although testing wasn’t part of this challenge, I wanted to add what testing is mostly about.
In this step of the design process, we need to take back to our users the new findings and do AB testing or usability testing to get feedback; then we can redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel. Even during this phase, we go back to the previous steps to keep improving solutions to the problem and understanding better our users.
Conclusion and what I’ve learned
In this exercise, I learned that we need time to understand deeply the product and its users.
It helped me to be patient with the process and give time to each step, to elaborate a good, understandable study case. What I liked the most is to see all the different ways that a problem can be solved and how the solution will always be according to the group that you are designing for.
— Thank you so much for reading! :)
