IronHack Challenge — Citymapper

Ironhack prework: Citymapper — Challenge1

Citymapper is a public transit and mapping startup based in London, UK. Their goal is to solve the problems of urban mobility by offering the quickest and cheapest public and private transport routes to their users.

My task as a UI/UX Designer was to create a feature for Citymapper that will solve the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.

In order to come up with a solution for the new feature and get ideas from Users and their environment, I conducted a series of interviews with some friends who commute to work to find out their needs and insights on transportation, and also checked upon the client’s competition.

During the interviews, I came across a couple of problems that Users face when commuting with public or private transportation.

The main problems that I found were the following:

• Handicapped people need disabled-accessible transport modes only
• Eco friendly users want to use only electric powered vehicles — public and private

After defining the problem, I thought about ways to solve the issues and came across two different solutions based on my findings.
At this stage, I used brainstorming to generate lots of ideas to solve the problem and ideated them through sketching.

The next step was to create the following prototype based on the top solutions in order to validate my ideas and become a starting point for a high fidelity prototype in the next iteration.

Solution 1

Citymapper needs a new feature to solve the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.

My proposal is to connect the payment service Paypal to the app and from there the user can book their rides with any public transport company directly from the app.

The button <Open> would be replaced by <Book Now>, so there will be no need that the user will leave the app to access the services provider in order to book a ride.

The idea is that Citymapper gets paid a commission on top of each ride sold on their app by the Transport Companies.

Solution 2

During the interview with users, the main problem detected was the fact that user with disabilities cannot filter Disabled-Accessible Transport only on the app.

My idea is to include a button to filter only rides that are capable to transport disabled people, as well as adequate pavement and access to stations, such as elevators and ramps.

Solution 3

Another problem found during the interviews relates to sustainability, where eco friendly users would want to choose electric powered vehicles only.

The solution I came across with is similar to the one on the previous case, a button is included in the filter so the app will only display electric powered vehicles on their list.

Conclusion

During the Design Thinking process I put into practice what I learned during the previous lessons about User-Centered Design, following the best practices to bring about improvements to the Citymapper app according to the users’ unarticulated needs observed during the Empathize step, then Defining the problem, Ideating a solution, Prototyping the idea and getting ready for Testing, completing the iterating cycle of the Design Thinking Method.