Ironhack’s Prework — Challenge 1: Design Thinking
This Design Thinking Challenge is part of the Prework Course for Ironhack UX/UI Design Bootcamp that I will be attending soon. It’s intendend to a be a preparation for the bootcamp by giving us the fundamentls of UX/UI Design and introduces to the learning by doing methodology.
For this pratical exercise we received two key informations. The client which is Citymapper and the pain point for many of their users is “ the different amount of public transport tickets the users have to purchase”. To try to solve this problem the requested task was to present an omnichannel solution that allows them to purchase different transport tickets by creating a new feature.
Citymapper is a public and private transports app that displays on the map all the route options for going from a starting point to a destination. It can show the different options per mean of transport or combine them. The main goal of this app is to provide acess to real-time transit information on several cities accross the world to make it easier to move on complex transport nets.
The Design Thinking Approach
In order to respond to the requested task it was necessary to apply a methodological human-centered approach and go through the set of these first four ordered phases:
I) Empathize
In this early phase of the process it is essential to gather understanding of what are the users feelings and needs to know for who are we designing for.
To do that I considered potential users of this app have ages between 20 to 55 years old and mostly use it whenever they are abroad visiting a city that offers a variety of transport means.
As for the main problem is not having a feature that allows the users to acquires all type of tickets in app. Although already has some APIs to external mobile applications of private transports when they need to combine multiple transport means or only take public transports there is no simple way to pay for those travels.
Regarding the tone/feeling of this app the potential users are mostly likely to perceive this app as a search tool for the best routes to take or even to schedule their travels within the city.
When solving a problem for a client it can be useful to benchmarking other companies and their solutions. With that aim in mind I identified three competitors which offers similiar online services and also opperates worldwide: Moovit specialized in public transports, MAPS.ME that has maps for several types of services not only transports and Rome2rio which predicts routes to almost every location not necessarily cities.
II) Define
By interviewing potential users I gathered insights from their point of views about using public transports whenever they are abroad.
Synthesizing it these were the main findings:
- Difficult to find a source of information that collects all the city transport options and their respective routes;
- Maps that includes all of the city’s routes are often not easy to understand;
- Lack of transparency when buy ticket plans about the transport options that are included;
- Feeling of over paying than they need to get access to more combinations of transport routes;
- Selecting where to buy tickets is most of the times a long shot.
In short the process of buying tickects abroad can be time consuming once users have to analyze different sources of information to choose the one that best fit their needs and search for where to acquire them which can means managing multiple types of platforms (physicals or online). According to this problem statement I concluded that the potential users are looking for (as an unarticulated need) an omnichannel solution. Which replies with both information directly related to their needs and also allows them to purchase the corresponding tickets.
As the Citymapper app already replies to the need of getting specific information to a transport search I focused on the second part of the problem statement for the next two phases of the design thinking process.
III) Ideate
In this phase I came up with three design opportunities (D.O.) for a new feature that might reply to the need of purchasing all type of tickets for city transports.
D.O. #1 → One of the hypothesis would be to buy the tickets directly to a transport operator throughout the app. This means the app would have one API per operator in order to the users go directly to the platform where to buy the tickets. Basically it would be extending the option that already existis for private transport companies. However not all of the public transport operators have a online website or app to buy tickets. So this is not a viable option.
D.O. #2 → Another alternative would be to buy multiple tickets in the app cart. With only one click on the selected journey the user can buy tickets for different transport operators at the same time. Although this is a viable option the user would have to buy all the tickets in advance which can pottencially goes wrong and bring more pain points if they mistake about the starting point, destination or timetable or even give up on the travels. So it might not be the best choice in terms of user experience.
D.O. #3 → The last alternative is a pay-as-you-go solution which means the user only pays for the transports used. So instead of buying the tickets they are postpaid. The user only has to associate a debit or credit card to his Citymapper account and then use his smartphone’s NFC technology on the public transports’ card readers for the app register a ticket order and the user has immediatly access to the choosen travel option. Without finding user experience disadvantages this was the chosen design opportunity to create a new feature for Citymapper users to buy public transport tickets in app.
IV) Prototype
As the final result I created a prototype by hand-sketching a few screens. The first two screens do not require any action from user in the app and they represent the sequence of messages from the app that pops up after the smartphone touches the transports’ card reader and confirm its the payment authorization. The following four screens correspond to the user flow to check his public transport payments.
Lesson learned
During this process I had the chance to practice how to find a problem statement from the replies and observations of the interviewed and from that to purpose multiple solutions until it find the one that most suits to reply the identified pain points.
