Ironhack’s Prework Citymapper Challenge 1

Applying the Design Thinking method

Hi everyone ! As an Ironhacker studying UX/UI Design, my first challenge is to propose a new feature for the Citymapper app, applying the 4 first steps of the Design Thinking process (empathize, define, ideate and prototype). In this Medium post I’ll be sharing my findings at every stage.

A short story about the client : Citymapper

Born in London in 2011, Citymapper is a journey planner application that aims to “make cities usable”. It gathers data from every transport mode, usually in real-time, to offer the users a selection of optimized transport options between two locations in a supported city. The users can choose their preferred way to reach their destination between walking, cycling, driving, public transport, and can even choose whether they are looking for the cheapest, the fastest, the simplest or the most protected from the rain journey. Citymapper is available across 100 cities around the world.

It has many competitors on the market such as Google Maps, UrbanGo, Moovit, and some local public transport companies’ app for example.

Citymapper makes urban mobility easier but there remains a problem to address to really make cities usable for everyone: the ticket buying process to access public transports. The travelers must purchase a certain number of tickets to travel, most of the time coming in paper of plastic cards.

Let’s apply the Design Thinking process to find out how to optimize the experience for the users of Citymapper.

1. EMPATHIZE

The first step is to get a better understanding of who the users are and what they are looking for when using Citymapper. To do so, I interviewed some of them to know more about their experience and to see how we can upgrade it.

Here are the questions I had prepared to conduct the interviews:

1. How do you feel about moving from a place to another in urban areas?

2. Can you tell me about your favorite transport mode?

-> If it includes public transports: what do you like about them?

-> If not: how do you feel about public transports?

3. How do you plan your itinerary when travelling in a city? Do you use an app?

4. How do you buy tickets if needed?

-> Could you tell me about your best experience of buying tickets?

-> And about the worst?

5. How do you feel about having your tickets on your phone?

The 5 persons I interviewed where rather young people (20–35 years old) living in a city and who enjoy traveling abroad, in cities as well.

Interviews findings:

· Public transport mode is the preferred one to them, even and especially when travelling abroad;

· The tickets buying process is sometimes annoying to them due to: lack of information on where to purchase it, forgetting the Oyster card they already had bought on a previous journey to London and having to buy it again, losing their paper tickets, not being able to pay by credit card when entering certain transport such as bus;

· They enjoy having real-time updated information on the current state of every transport mode, the schedules etc;

· Most of them would be comfortable with having their tickets on their phone.

2. DEFINE

These interviews allowed me to understand that buying tickets in an unknown urban area can be confusing for the users. Even in their own city, there can be different areas requiring different kind of tickets and it can be difficult to know whether their current transport card is allowing them to access certain places or not.

Problem statement: how to integrate the ticket buying part of the journey planning to the app to make it easier ?

An ideal solution would have to:

· Provide the users with complete and reliable information on which tickets to buy (and where);

· Make users gain time by allowing them to do the purchasing ticket process when planning their journey in advance.

3. IDEATE

The two top ideas I had while brainstorming about the best solutions for this problem were:

1) Including data on transport companies ticketing systems in the app: when planning their journey, the users would have access to the best itinerary but also to details on its cost, on how and where to buy tickets for this journey, if credit card/contact free payment is available or not.

2) Develop a partnership with the transport companies to offer a dematerialized ticketing system: the ticket buying process would be completely integrated to the journey planning in the app and the users could be able to buy and store their tickets in their phone.

I chose to prototype the second one as it is the one allowing to fully integrate the ticket buying process to the app, making the journey planning experience complete.

4. PROTOTYPE

I drew on paper the way it could look like :

Paper prototype

The user flow would be as follow :

1. Open the app and select a destination
2. Select an itinerary
3. View the itinerary details
4. Get more details about the cost and the tickets needed (at this stage there would be an option that indicate if the user already has the tickets/the transport card)
5. Buying tickets on the app
6. Accessing the wallet
7. Selecting the tickets/transport card needed to access the transport mode
8. Scanning the QR code.

Conclusion

This whole process was really instructive and allowed me to understand how powerful sketching is to produce and communicate ideas. A paper prototype can be made quite quickly and is still effective to get the main idea. The next step would be to test it on the persons that were interviewed to get their feedback and see if it would suit them.