Ironhack’s Prework:[CityMapper]_Challenge1
The problem:
Public Transport Tickets / Purchasing Tickets:
- Paper/Plastic Cards
- Very ofter buing differents tickets is necessary to go from point A to point B
- The process of purchasing tickets [the lack of understanding of the tickets in every city]
Task:
Create a feature for this app that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.
Plan:
Follow the design thinking metheology:
1_ EMPATHIZE
The first step of the Design Thinking is to get familiarity with the product and the most important, to get understand the target user. So, there are two phases to get that: The personal instropection and the enviromant interview.
· The personal instropection:
The questions below, help me to realize the product’s demands, in this case: The Citymapper’s App.
1._What problem are you solving?
The annoying purchasing process of the many different tickets that the user need to do, to go from different points in a city.
2._Who’s your audience?
Every person who usually use the public transport and need a map to show direccions, routes and transports around the city
3._Who is your client competition?
The most used apps for showing routes are Google Maps, Apple Maps, and way behind, Waze, so these three are the client’s strongest competitors.
Although they all have a user-friendly design and are intuitive to use, the high popularity of the first two resides in the convenience that they come preinstalled on most devices. If convenience is a key decisive factor, the client’s app Citymapper needs to offer more convenient functionalities that account for the hassle of installing an extra app.
4._What’s the tone / feeling?
Looking at the branding, we can see a young, jolly and casual style. The green tones make reference to nature, so they are a symbol of fresh, optimism, good luck and evoke calm and vigor. This color is most aligned to the ideas of balance and serenity, thus for an app that you use then you are stressed out because you are lost or in a hurry to go somewhere, this is a wonderful color.
· Enviromant Interview
The first step consisted in preparing a set of questions aimed at knowing the user’s opinions on certain key points regarding the use of public transportation. Once the main topics for discussion were decided, I thought it would be useful to design a flowchart for the interview, so as to guide the next questions according to the previous answers. This has helped to engage the inverviewees in a fluent conversation, leaving them some room to wander off the subject, but also ensuring that the important questions were not unanswered.
2_ DEFINE
After the interviews, I composed simplified versions of Persona’s cards summarizing the user’s main needs (how many transports, how often, etc.), and their main annoyances (lost tickets, poor information, etc.).
Thanks to the Persona’s cases, I was able to gather the most relevant Pain Points regarding the use of public transport, as well as opinions on what they would desire from a route planner app.
3_ IDEATE
I used the Brainstorming technique to generate many ideas and solutions. After mind mapping the possible options, I found two useful ideas to improve the app for the users.
1) Help to buy a ticket
When a route that requires public transportation is displayed, a new option “!info” becomes available to get more information on where and how to obtain the necessary tickets. Also, a live-chat option allows to obtain further assistance. Moreover, it should include more information on the particularities about how the ticketing system works in every city (valid zones, how to validate, etc.).
2) In-app ticket purchase system
I considered three different methods to purchase tickets: using QR codes, mobile contactless payment, and prepaid cards delivered to your home beforehand. Regardless of the purchase method selected, the app should include an option to buy in a single operation all the necessary tickets to cover the entire selected route.
4_ PROTOTYPE
I decide to prototype a mobile contactless payment.
FLOW’S USER
FINAL CONCLUSIONS
As this was my first time doing “Design Thinking”, I had to work on myself to listen carefully, with a more open-minded attitude, to start ideating from the user’s needs and inputs, rather than from my own deductions and personal observations.
I think the interviews are a key point for good UX research because they provide really interesting feedback. Asking open questions gave me more insight and information than I expected. It was really useful to see all the pain points that a traveller can find when travelling abroad.
Sketching with paper, gave me the opportunity to test really quickly my findings, visualize the flow, and check the functionality of the app.
