User-Centered Design

3 min readSep 24, 2018

By: Maya Fernandes

Travis VanderZanden, founder & CEO of Bird Scooters

Introduce the designer selected and the reason for selection

Travis VanderZanden is a businessman. He was the Chief Operating Officer at Lyft and later worked at Uber where he held the role of VP of International Growth. With the knowledge he gained from these two positions, VanderZanden decided he would create his own Uber-like service and founded his own company, only this one would be revolving around scooters instead of cars.

I chose this designer because he has done so much with the company in such little time. Bird was founded exactly one year ago and has already grown into a $1 billion company. Another reason is that his company only just started offering their services in Cincinnati this past summer at the end of July.

Describe a project in which they practiced user-centered design

Bird is an electric scooter-sharing service. The steps taken to use a bird scooter is very simple. A person opens the Bird app on their phone to find the nearest scooter, which is normally no further than a minute’s walk away. Once said person locates one, they pay $1 to activate the scooter and then $0.15 for every minute you use it. When you have reached your destination, you just leave it out of the way of traffic and you can be on your way. At the end of the day, there are people that drive around and pick up the scooters, to charge them overnight. Then in the morning, they place them in areas with high concentrations of people for use. One scooter user, Jessica said, “The way that Bird scooters operate is very unique and unlike other services. Compared to bike rentals, you don’t have to find a rack to dock your scooter when you’re done, you can leave them literally anywhere!”

What user-centered design principles and methods did the designer utilize?

There are many principles that were used when putting Bird scooter service together. Some of the principles used were: reduce unnecessary mental effort for the user, present information clearly, and design for a specific task. To ensure Bird usability VanderZanden did a trial run in Santa Monica for about a month to see how users responded to the scooter service and any feedback that they had. There was a lot of useful feedback (make the app easier to navigate, etc.).

Whom were the designers target audience? What was their gender, generation, culture, and profession?

Bird’s target audience is anyone over the age of 18, however, the service’s main users are teenagers and college students because it is a quick and easy way of transportation. The scooters are meant for people trying to go short distances, specifically for instances where a person could walk somewhere, but doesn’t want to, and a car is not worth taking.

How did practicing user-centered design add value to the project as a whole?

After talking to a bunch of Bird scooter users, I came to the conclusion that Bird has a very high customer satisfaction rate. Steven, one of the people I talked to, said “Bird is my go to when I’ve got to run errands. It’s perfect because I don’t have a car and the grocery store is on the opposite side of campus.” All this positive feedback tells me that because user-centered design was practiced when creating Bird scooters, they are liked a lot more than if it had not been practiced. It helped Bird create a service that found one solution to a problem that focused on the user’s needs instead of what would sell best.

What are the key takeaways from this assignment?

User-centered design principles & methods are important to use when designing a service or product because it allows the designer to keep checking that they are creating something that people will actually want to use.