Case Study: Citymapper, Design Thinking

I just signed up to ironhacks UX/UI Design course here in Madrid and this is my first pre-work project, to solve a problem that the citymapper app has. The result of this challenge; an ideal solution that I would personally love to see implemented.

First, Lets Talk About the Client

Citymapper is an application that enables users to find travel route options in live time. It displays all the different transport options (walking, driving, train, etc) between two locations on a map. It also shows users the time it would take to travel with each different route or type of transportation for easy comparison.

Citymapper originated in London and eventually expanded to other major cities around the world. Their mission was to make commute navigation within the city easier by simplifying urban transportation, taking real life data and delays into account.

‘Citymapper Pass’ was introduced in London in 2019 which offered unlimited transportation throughout the city for a monthly fee. However it was recently discontinued due to its limitations.

So Whats the Problem?

I interviewed 5 citymapper users to find out the main problems that they faced. Between them there was a few main problems being repeated, that was:

• Users found themselves being overwhelmed at times by the process to purchase tickets for transport. This ended up incurring them extra time/costs for their commute that weren’t accounted for on the app.
• Experiences with unexpected delays and/or additional fees when commencing on their route.
• The map wasn’t always accurate when using self navigation, leading to delays in arriving to their destinations.
• Inaccuracies with real-time data, public transport not arriving or arriving at a different time.
• Language barriers within the app, but also in real life with experiences leading to users not understanding how to purchase a ticket once they arrived.
• Users taking wrong modes of transportations due to inaccuracies of time, price and availability.

It All Comes Down to One Main Problem…

It’s all too complicated. The main problem to be solved is that users of the app ‘citymapper’ are often overwhelmed by the different amount of public transport tickets they have to purchase individually.

The Solution!

“It’s a problem. That’s all it is. It’s a problem with no solution. And that’s what I do, I solve problems. That’s what I do best.” ~ A Beautiful Mind, One of my favourite lines ever!

If i’m being honest, to me the solution for this problem I found quite simple. A ticketing system through the app.

This problem can be solved by implementing a ticketing system run through the app where users can allocate credit onto their account which can then be used to tap on to bus’s or trains using a QR code and/or a system similar to apple pay. I imagine this would vary in different cities.

My vision is that it would work as a system in which you pay per trip through the one platform.

Lets See How This Could Work

Here, you can see that I have added pricing for the public transport for users to be able to compare it to the price of a taxi for example.

Once you select your route, the app will show you how much credit you have left to see if you can cover the price of the transportation.

Credit can be set to top up automatically every month, or users can manually go through and top up their account. This credit can be linked with all transport options including lime, uber, metro, etc. All in one place.

Basically, you select your route, click go, and thats it!
all the payment is processed through the app.

I imagine some cities and modes of transportations might not have the technology set up in order to function this way and so a QR code or Apple Pay might need to come into play.

In these cases you would scan your QR code where necessary, or tap on using a citymapper ‘card’ that is saved to your apple wallet.

Still so much more simple!

Time to Recap

Throughout the course of this project I had many interesting findings:

• Citymapper had already attempted to implement a solution to this problem and although it was successful it was discontinued for its limitations
  Findings; you can learn from other peoples mistakes
• Other cities have successfully implemented similar solutions
  Findings; you can also learn from other peoples success

When it comes to UX/UI design there are always going to be an unlimited amount of ideas to combat problems, our job is to uncover the right problem in order to find the best solution.

Thank you!

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I hope you found my first post interesting! I would love to know your thoughts in the Medium comments, any thoughts are welcome i’m always open to constructive criticism for improvement.

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