Pedals delivery- Client project
General Assembly Project 5- User Experience Design Immersive Program
Team: Farida Lodhi, Vianney Le Masne, Alexandra Shaw
The Client:
Our brief for Project 5 was to to redesign a website for a London based bicycle delivery service. Pedals (pedals-delivery.com), is a London-based, pedal powered bicycle courier service providing eco-conscious companies and individuals with a green, hassle-free and affordable option for delivering goods from A to B throughout the city.

The Challenge & Context:
Pedals launched its services in October 2015, and are now looking to further enhance their product and services. However, they currently have to provide a great deal of customer on-boarding support as the existing website is not intuitive and easy to understand. Pedals need to re-design their website to help their potential and existing customers understand what they offer as well as inform customers of how to use their services. Our brief was to re-design the Pedals website with a focus on improving the on-boarding customer experience and create a more intuitive process for customers to use their services. This would enable Pedals to reduce the need for handholding through the booking process, and decrease the frequency of customer inquiries.
Research & Insights:
We started by understanding the competitive landscape in which Pedals operated. While competitors focus on providing affordable and reliable services with good customer support, they also offer other delivery options such as cars and vans.

Pedals is unique in that it is a completely green bicycle delivery service and that the majority of its customers are startups in the early growth phase. It provides delivery support to local startups when no formal logistics are in place. Most of these startups produce local goods such as peanut butter or beverages. The green delivery option may be built into the customers brand as it grows, appealing to the growing number of eco-conscious customers in London. We discovered that Pedals has the ability to create a unique positioning in the competitive landscape, and that Pedals should emphasise its local, startup support and eco differentiation on its website.
We interviewed Pedals existing customers to understand their needs and pain points. Existing customers valued ecological delivery and found it easy to obtain a quick quote through Pedals. They also found it easy to book a delivery once they understood how the process worked. However, they needed to be walked through the process of booking when they used the website for the first time as they found it difficult to understand this through the website. They also valued Pedals’ high touch and flexible customer support and call Pedals often as they were confused about delivery options and whether their package could be delivered by the cyclist.
We also spoke to other small businesses and users of delivery services to understand the goods delivery process and the needs of these users.

Users felt that speed and reliability of a delivery service was key. They also wanted the ability to be able to track their delivery online and although they like to self serve they want to be able to speak to a person if they needed help.
Based on our client and user discussions, we created two personas, which we felt represented typical profiles of users of Pedals and goods delivery services.

We selected Olivia, who is the CEO of a local startup, as our primary persona. We felt that she is representative of Pedals customer base and by addressing her needs and challenges, we would optimise the experience for most of Pedals customers. We also developed two scenarios that Olivia faces and aimed to optimise her experience taking these scenarios into consideration: As a first time user of the site, Olivia wants to learn more about Pedals and how its service works. Once she decides to use Pedals, she wants to book a delivery. We also mapped out Olivia’s current experience of the website. When Olivia uses the site as a new visitor she currently finds it confusing to find out about the delivery options that Pedals offers. While the finds the quick quote feature simple and easy to use, she is a bit anxious about whether her package will fit on the cycle as the package details area is currently a free form text field without any guidance. Olivia is also unsure about delivery of the package once she confirms her order as she cannot track the package online and is relieved when the package is delivered to the customer.

We prioritised the features that we needed to build into 4 Categories. Based on the insights we generated, we felt that the features that had to be prioritised as core were designing clear navigation, simpler booking process, clarifying how the service works and a responsive website. Other features were prioritised as Should, Could or Won’t.
Design & Iteration:
We also conducted a design studio with our clients to understand their perceptions of Pedals strengths and customer pain points. We started exploring possibilities to address the challenge and sketched various ideas.

As we iterated these further through wireframes and testing, we focused on the areas we had priortised as ‘Must Haves’:
- Clearer Navigation
The existing header and footer navigation was complex and made it hard to find relevant information

The header navigation was seperated into two key areas: The left area focused on the two key actions visitors to the site were interested in: booking a delivery or learning more about the services. We also found that customers were confused about the delivery options: One-off, multi drop and per hour delivery, and seperated the delivery options into two main categories: one off delivery and multi drop delivery.
The right area focused on login and sign up options.

The existing footer section repeated the delivery options again.

We simplified this by having a section pertaining to information about Pedals, an email address area to get back to customers about specific questions that they may have and indicating a support area.

2. Intuitive Booking Process
We addressed three areas to make the booking process simpler
a) Postcode auto complete


b) Making delivery options easier to understand from a drop down to defaulting to standard delivery options, clarifying pricing options and also providing price quote and carbon emission savings at the top of the booking view.


c) Package Description: The existing website only has a free form field for item description which may not lead to specific information or lead to confusion for customers, cyclist and Pedals.

We changed this to:

One of the pain points for customers as we tested various iterations of our ideas was that it was not clear if package dimensions impacted pricing. As the package description section is now framed with thee price quote customers can now understand that these areas do not impact price. Customers can also clearly now understand the allowable dimensions.
We also added a chat function, so that customers do not have to get out of the process to ask any specific questions that they may have.
We also made the booking process more sequential so that customers could address one area completely and also see a final confirmation of their details before completing the booking.

3. Onboarding
There are now clearer details about benefits of Pedals for customers and a step by step guide on how the process works

Demo:
Clickable prototype on marvel
Next Steps:
Areas that should be explored further based on customer research and usability testing are:
- Delivery tracking: Customers like to feel in control of the process and know where their goods are
- Customer Profile section after Log-in: Customers would like to save delivery routes and addresses and be able to re-order from saved routes
- Progress Bar: Clarity on where customers are in the process and the steps that they need to complete is really important.

While they can see progress with the movement of the cyclist, and know that they are 4 steps in the booking process, the specific step they are in the process could also be clarified further. We tested some iterations of this such as the use of icons and drawers with text, however, we found that this led to customer confusion and that it reduced the simplicity of the navigation. Further work may be done to make this a simpler process with more comprehensive information.
