Citymapper: design thinking ideation on a ticket purchasing feature
The following project is a prework challenge for the Ironhack Bootcamp UX/UI Design (Berlin, 16.03–16.05.2020)
What if the same app, that shows you various ways to reach your destination, could also manage the tickets and payments for you?
Citymapper is a very neatly designed, map-based route planning app, that offers multiple ways of getting to a destination. It counts travel times and uses live-data to provide relevant information. Unfortunately, it still lacks a feature, that would take care of the ticket purchasing process.
I applied the methodology of design thinking to ideate on the problem and sketch out a simple prototype. Finally, I described, what I learned from this process.
1_EMPHATHIZE
I interviewed five people in Berlin about the way, they commute and purchase tickets. I did not stick to any rigid questionnaire, but to boost a conversation I asked questions like this:
- Do you often go by the means of public transportation in Berlin?
- Do you use any public transportation means other than the bus, tram and metro?
- How do you keep track of the payments?
- How do you handle this stuff in a new city?
- Is there anything that annoys you in the ticket purchasing process?
- What could be done to design the purchasing process better?
I found out (1) what are the main pain points in the ticket purchasing process, (2) if an automated feature would work for them and (3) what solutions should it provide, so they are eager to use it. To define the exact problem here, I extracted 2 personas from the information, I collected and put them in common situations, that could be solved in a more efficient and pleasurable way.
Dorota (27) from Warsaw just arrived in Berlin for the first time. She wants to commute fast from Friedrichshain to Charlottenburg for a meeting. She chooses to take the bus and then jump on the metro. The only problem is she has no idea, if and how to pay for that. She just goes out and asks around: the bus driver checks tickets already on the entrance, but the vending machine is on the bus… OK, not optimal, but somehow she managed that… then she goes to the metro and she looks for another vending machine. She is already late and there is a huge line. This is so stressful!
Adam (35) from Berlin usually takes his own car. If he has to take public transportation, he is unhappy and confused about what tickets to buy. Once he bought a ticket for the metro and went the wrong direction, he had to get out and go to the other side of the station. He had no clue, if he should buy another ticket. Another time he took the ticket to the wrong zone and paid more then he needed. The system has many mysteries… you won’t know unless you get controlled.
2_DEFINE
From the analysis of the recorded interviews, I realized that users of public transportation are often confused about how, where and what tickets to buy. The purchasing process is not standardized, stressful and takes too much time.
How might we design a feature in Citymapper, that takes “controller-proof” care of the ticket purchasing process, so people can seamlessly move around the city without worrying about the various transportation payments?
3_IDEATE
First, I choose to freely generate ideas. I gave myself one minute for each idea, to create a broad spectrum of possible solutions without diving too deep into each of them. Since this here is just an exercise, I narrowed my scope to creating a user-friendly solution without worrying about security issues and other limitations for the time being.
4_PROTOTYPE
The former brainstorming provided me with a bunch of ideas about the feature options, as well as further scenarios, in which the feature would be useful. I chose the most basic of them and sketched a few exemplary screen flows.
The main flow is the process of buying tickets for a chosen route. First, the user defines the start and target, then they can pick from optional configurations to commute to the target. Then they see a detailed overview of the means of transportation and the prices. They can buy each ticket separately or pay for all the tickets upfront.
An additional feature I came up with is buying tickets “on the go”. If the feature is on, the user gets a notification, when they step into the mean of transportation, asking them if they want to buy a ticket. After confirming the app asks to define the target and the user can confirm the purchase.
5_LEARNINGS
While interviewing people I realized, that I can not approach interviewees with a set of generic questions, that I use in every conversation. However, before the interviews, I should clearly define, what I want to learn from those conversations and look for the answers later in the recordings.
First, the data collected in the interviews is a vague cloud of information, that needs to be filtered for relevance to the new feature, I am about to design. In this very case, many interviews were pretty similar. From the 5 interviews, I formed 2 personas that are a free mixture of the same features pains, needs, ideas, and behaviors, that my interviewees had. I learned that describing those personas in action is a perfect way to spot and show the moments, where the new feature might be useful. I found also, that this process is very intuitive and that there are many ways to come to a good problem definition.
I learned also, that the choice of the analyzing method should take into consideration the sort of information that I actually managed to collect. For example, in this case, all answers were very similar and I could process them easily in my head, so it did not make sense for me to make an affinity map. If I had to interview 100 people on a topic with more diversification, the approach to the information analysis would have to be more structured and strategic.
Moreover, in this exercise, I did not consider some problems that occurred in the conversations, which I find important to mention. Ultimately, I am training to spot and solve real problems in the future, so, for now, I would like to at least keep in mind, what would come up as a big obstacle, if this was a real job.
- One of my interviewees mentioned that the competing transportation providers often do not have any interest in one “umbrella app” to controlling access to their clients and all transactions.
- Some interviewees would be afraid of giving out their payment details to another application and said that a service that controls all their traffic transactions needed to be very, very trustworthy and they could not see how that might be a worldwide possibility.
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