Design Thinking Challenge | Citymapper new feature
My IronHack Journey — Challenge 1
And so the journey continues. After practicing some visual note-taking as the first exercise of the prework series of IronHack UX Design bootcamp, our very first challenge was to use the Design Thinking practice to add a new feature to the app Citymapper.
Wait. City…who?
Citymapper is a transport and navigation app that provides the user with all urban mobility options — from walking to carsharing — but it focuses on public transport. Knowing that cities are complicated, their goal is to make transport sustainable and hassle free. It started in 2011, in London, and now is available in 39 cities around the world.
It presents a very fun tone that suggests an aspiration to be close to the user, providing an easy and relaxing experience.
The proposed challenge was — through the Design Thinking methodology — to create a feature for Citymapper app that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.
The process
The best way to find a solution to a problem is to understand the needs of whoever is facing it — in this case, the user. And that’s the basis of the Design Thinking methodology: a human-centered (sometimes called user-centered) approach.
“When you understand the people you’re trying to reach — and then design from their perspective — not only will you arrive at unexpected answers, but you’ll come up with ideas that they’ll embrace.” — IDEO
So, basically, to create a great user experience, you need to think like the user, act like the user, see the world with the user’s eyes — put yourself on their shoes.
For that, the Design Thinking methodology suggests to follow a cycle of 5 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test — always with the user in mind!
And that’s how I’ve started to solve the Citymapper feature challenge.
Empathize
Empathy is the key!
The first Design Thinking step is to empathize. The goal here is to understand who the users are — so on the next stages we can think like them and find the best solution to our product. To start this human-centered approach, I interviewed 5 different potential users following this question guide:
- How often do you use public transport in a new place/ while aboard?
- How do you plan your trip to go from point A to point B?
- How do you buy your tickets?
- Think about an experience you had to go somewhere new. Tell me about the process/the steps you took.
- What kind of problem have you experienced while buying a ticket? What annoys you?
- What would make the experience better?
- Do you use any app to plan your trip? And to buy tickets?
It’s interesting to mention that I didn’t strictly follow the guide, since the goal was to take the interview like a conversation and collect as much information as I could. In a few cases, I found the users anticipating some answers before even asking them about it.
This was due to a trial and error method, since I felt that my first interview wasn’t great. At the beginning it was a bit awkward, because I gave opportunities to close-ended questions and it didn’t really feel like a casual conversation. It was great to identify this pain point of the process so I could make sure that it wouldn’t happen again — and I can say that from the second interview on the results were much better.
Interview analyses
After collecting all the interview data, I made an affinity diagram so I could organize all the insights and combine them in groups to better analyse them later. These were the steps to do so:
- Writing down all the key-words of all the answers I got. Different questions were represented by different colours. Because of that I had all my data together in a very visual way.
- Looking at all data and sorting it by different topics such as main struggles, highlights, competitor’s apps, what user would do to have a better experience and so on.
- Analysing all the organised data by theme, so I could create the Insights Statements which would be the basis of the next stage of the whole process.
Define
Creating a point of view based on user insights
After the data collection, the next step was to define the problem that was about to be solved. To do so, I used my Insight Statements to define the main pain points, all based on what I heard from the potential users.
Problem statements
Analysing all the data helped me to create a main problem statement that I also divided into 3 other problems, so I would have even more ideas on the brainstorming stage.
User Persona
I also created a persona, which helps a lot during the process. According to Careerfoundry, a user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
On that stage we define the user needs, goals, behaviour, pain points and personalised them into one person profile.
Meet Júlia, a 27yo woman that always uses public transport, especially when travelling:
Now, instead of thinking about the “user” — which it could be anyone and so a bit of an abstract concept — I’m thinking about Júlia, the persona I’ve created based on the research and interviews.
Thinking about her and like her will make the steps of the next stage much easier and accurate.
HMW Statements
Between the Define and Ideate phases, I’ve come up with some How might we questions, based on the problems I found. These questions work as a guide for the ideation stage.
The key is to create questions that are broad enough to bring a variety of concepts, but narrow enough to suggest specific solutions.
I’ve started rephrasing the Problem Statements adding “How might we” at the beginning of the sentences and then breaking them into other questions that I found could be helpful for the process.
Ideate
Finding a solution
Now is time to ideate! The goal here is to generate as many ideas as possible, the more the merrier — usually using brainstorming techniques. The first thoughts can be too generic but they end up helping the creation of a chain of ideas that will help to come up with an innovative solution.
I’ve started it answering the HMW questions and writing down everything that came to my mind. From there, I kept brainstorming on how I could develop the ideas and put them into the app — like creating a ticket feature, alerts for short transfers on a trip — literally everything that could help my persona to have a better experience.
Prototype
Developing a solution
After roughing some ideas, I focused on only one to build a prototype, which in this case was to create a better digital experience adding a ticket feature.
The goal on this stage is to put the idea on paper and try to validate it — by hand-sketching it, for example — showing all the phases and features needed and also starting to think about the structure of the app.
The important point here is to create something concrete and understandable enough so people can test it, evaluate it and give some feedback — it doesn’t have to look like a masterpiece.
So here I hand-sketched the screens for the app — focusing on the idea of buying a ticket within the app with the goal to make the whole journey experience easier for the user.
What I’ve learned throughout the process
Wow! That was harder than I thought but I think I’m starting to understand the whole process better. I’m really curious to apply the Design Thinking methodology in other projects and compare the different journeys.
For now, these are the lessons I take with me:
- The first stages are so important! Since the design thinking is human-centered based, it’s extremely important to run good interviews — which are the basis of the whole process. Basically all decisions you make depend on the data you collect — so it should be high-quality content.
- It’s not that easy to make an interview: you have to think about your goal and make sure you make the right questions, the ones that will really help you to develop a better solution.
- Listen, listen, listen! Really understanding your user is the key for developing innovative and accurate solutions.
- You have to focus on only one problem at a time. If you start to prototype more than one idea, you can get lost on the way and the quality of the solution can be questionable.
- It’s an iterative process. It’s never really over. Testing with users and listening to their opinions are the key to always improve the experience.
- The 5th stage of Design Thinking (test), wasn’t part of the challenge for now, but it is as important as the other stages! Testing with users, listening to what they have to say and collecting their feedback is extremely important and it’s a crucial part of this iterative cycle.
