Challenge 1: Design Thinking
In this first challenge I will explain and showcase the process of solving the problem of urban mobility by offering the quickest and cheapest public and private transport routes to their users. For that I’ll be looking at an app called Citymapper where you can find similar functionalities. The main problem to solve the different amount of public transport tickets the users have to purchase. First I’ll put some context with basic questions I asked myself to understand better the problem, then I’ll show some interviews I did to get more details of the users, and finally I’ll provide some feedback of the project with a paper prototype design of one possible solution. The project was done in the city of Barcelona. Here I will show some basic questions I asked myself before diving deep in the project:
What problem are you solving? The fact that every time someone wants to purcharse a ticket, is different depending on many variables. It needs to make it easier for the process of buying tickets and more intuitive.
Who is your audience? Everybody that uses the app. It will probably be more focus on the younger generation and adults because they are the ones who are usually more acostumed to using the apps in the phone. The target also should be interested in taking the public and privat transportation and should not have their own vehicle.
Who is your client’s competition? Every app that does a similar function, probably the more common ones are the public apps that each city offers for their population. And of course the usual Google Maps, Maps from Iphone and Android…
What’s the tone/feeling? At first seems like a pretty complicated subject to solve cause there’s no direct answer to the question we are asking ourselves and it’s pretty open. I would say that the main feeling of the users is confusion, because they need a question to get answered.
In the next part of the project I’ve completed 5 interviews to get information about how the users are feeling in similar situation I’m interested in that could lead me to obtain more valuable details for the investigation. The subjects range between 17 and 40 years old, they are mostly foreigners with the exception of one. Here you can see the questions selected to use as pinpoints for the interviews.
Personal questions: Name? Age? Place of birth? Ocupation?
Project related questions: Have you taken the public transportation here before? How many times a week would you say you take the public transportation? Is it easy for you to get around and locate yourself? What are the main problems you usually face when trying to get your tickets and moving around the city? Have you tried any other methods that could help you in this confusing situations? What would you change if you had the possibility to do so?
The conclusions I’ve obtained are many, but there are especially two that stand out to me, the main one being the difficulties of the foreigners users to understand the instructions of the machines where you can get your metro tickets, if you add the bad english usually spanish people have and that in the metro, normally, they are not willing to help others out, at least acording to the interviews I’ve done. The other point is that, for the most part, the users move by metro, and they take the bus, taxi and other transportation in rare ocations. So for this two reasons I’ll be focusing my efforts in designing something for the users to understand better the metro system in Barcelona.
As you can see in the paper prototype design down this paragraph, the solution I’ve come up with is to guide the users to some tips popups where they will get instructions to follow when something they don’t understand occurs. For example, the first time they use the app and they follow a route, a popup message will appear, asking them if they need some advice or not. In adition, for them to acces this help again, next to the icons at the top right of the routes, I added one with an interrogation, where they will get the same instructions as before, regarding how to obtain the ticket, which tickets may be more suitable for them…
For the conclusions I would say that is very difficult to find an automatic system that works for every city in the world which indicates everything about every transportation that is there. But you can take easy actions like the one I just mentioned before, where you give the users some more information regarding whats steps to follow in different situations. I really liked the experience of practicing empathy to understand more deeply the feelings and experiences of each user. As this is one of my earliest projects I hope it wasn’t too bad for my inexperience, I’m really looking forward to keep learning and imporving each day! Thank you so much for reading until the end!