Ironhack’s Prework: MarcGallifa_Challenge1

If you live in a big city, you might probably use public transport regularly to commute to places around town. If the city is big enough some routes can be complex to figure out due to the vast amount of lines and channels available. However, it tends to get chaotic and complex to figure out what’s the fastest and best route. That’s why CityMapper, helps figuring out the best transport option available from point A to B to the users, providing the exact time require, what transport channels you need to take, the exact schedules or the calories burned per route.

However, purchasing tickets can be difficult when you are mixing different transport channels. Hence, in this project we want to get to solve the multiple tickets purchasing.

Define pain-pints

First of all it’s important to define our needs so the goals are clear from the get-go;

-What problem are we solving?

We want to solve the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets from different apps or websites by condensing the ticket’s purchase into one feature.

-Who is our audience?

My audience are middle-class locals who move a lot within the city (either for work or pleasure), tourists and students. Our audience age is between 16–50 years old.

Who is our client’s competition?

The biggest competition of CityMapper is Moovit and Transit

-What’s the tone/feeling?

When users use CityMapper is because they are taking a route they probably haven’t used before or because the public transport channel they often use isn’t available, hence the user is CityMapper as a guide while they embark into a new route or new transport channel. Oftentimes, when taking an unknown route, it can feel confusing, complex or even stressful. Hence, it is important to make the feature very clear and straightforward, so our users can proceed with the purchasing of the tickets without stress and in a short amount of time. In order to save time, it will need to be very concise so it feels simple and ready-to-use.

Interview phase

Once our goals are defined we need to get to know our potential users. I interviewed 4 users: Jonas (29 years old, male, works remotely but socializes on daily basis around different parts of the city), Sonny (46, male, tourist on his first visit in Berlin, uses public transport to move around), Malena (33 yo, waitress, commutes daily to work), Tommy (39 years old, filmmaker, commutes daily for work).

Some of the questions asked during the interviews:

• What role does public transport plays in your daily life?
• -Do you like using public transport?
• How do you feel when using different transport channels?
• Is there any app, guide you use to navigate through the city via public transport?
• How do you buy tickets for it?
• -What’s your ideal payment method for tickets.
• -How do you feel when purchasing tickets?
• -What can be improved when buying tickets?

Some of the insights gathered after the interviews were the following:

• I used it everyday, I always do the same route so I don’t need any app
• I keep going to different places in town, so the routes are always different so I need to check Maps constantly, although it tends to be misleading
• I have a bonus for metro and bus but sometimes other transport channels are faster but I don’t know how to pay
• The least amount of time I can spend in a station the better, so I always prefer to buy tickets online
• as a tourist it is confusing to know what tickets to buy
• many times I want to pay for tickets but I just don’t know which one or where to buy them
• I don’t like queuing so online always preferred
• purchasing tickets requires time and energy sometimes, so much things to fill out
• Making all payment in-one would be awesome
• I like using public transport because is eco-friendly
• If i could I would walk or bike but public transport is the fastest option
• I would like easygoing options to purchase tickets and faster.

After gathering all the info and processing the insights I decided to sketch a couple wireframes, where the payment option would appear right in the map page and a dropdown menu will appear with different payment methods and info of the total costs.

In order to define the prototype more, I decided to do a mid-quality prototype on Figma, where the dropdown menu is more defined and clearly showcased.

On the map page, there will be a information of the route, costs and ETA and two buttons will lead the user either to the specific directions of the route (GO) and to the ticket’s purchase (PAY).

Once the user clicks on PAY, a dropdown meny will appear showcasing the total costs of the whole route trip and the payment methods.

Once the purchased is done, the user will receive a QR code as proof of the tickets and will be able to use this QR code in any platforms needed for the route the user searched for.