Ironhack Week 1 | Wicked problems: investigating Mexico City’s metro system
The first week of my Ironhack UX/UI bootcamp in Mexico City was packed full of theory around Design Thinking, User Research and User-Centric Design. Week One was arguably more research heavy, which made me feel quite comfortable given my background as a news reporter. I no longer feel anxious asking someone on the street for a five minute interview. However, what I’ve taken away from my first bootcamp group project in a 4-day sprint is a new way of interviewing “regular people”, which involves less control of the interview and more listening.
Why it’s important to address global issues
Problems can be overwhelming. Problems at a grand scale can seem unsolvable. Mexico City is one of the most populated cities in the world. It’s metro system is known among locals for being overcrowded and uncomfortable at times. But no good has ever come from giving up.
In Week One we had to roll up our sleeves and tackle global issues (others looked at racism and malnutrition) through Design Thinking principles and User Experience research. Our particular brief was to ascertain what the greatest problem of the product or service is, who its principal users are and how we could, as UX/UI designers, offer solutions and futures.
I found some solace in the words of Charles Kettering, who was an American inventor, engineer, businessmen and most notably the head of research at General Motors for almost three decades (1920–47).
“A problem well stated is a problem half solf-solved.” — Charles Kettering
And so along with the three other UX/UI designers in my group, we began to conduct research on mobility not only in Mexico City, but around the world in order to reach some sort of solution by the end of the week. While we don’t have control over government budgets, as UX/UI designers we can use methodologies to obtain meaningful insights.
How to pinpoint customer pain points
While some less agreeable aspects of the Mexico City metro are known among locals (including lack of air conditioning, safety concerns, delays), we decided to “go to the people” and find out what metro users are actually saying on the ground.
Our UX strategy was split between a user survey and user interviews, as well as interviews with experts in urban public transport. We were given one day to gather user information, and so we split our efforts between a Google Forms survey (which we sent distributed through social networks) and short interviews which we recorded outside a principal metro station in the city (Insurgentes). Some comments we heard were: “I’m not a feminist but I don’t feel comfortable in the mixed-sex carriages,” “I have never seen the accessibility lifts in operation,” and “the ticket price keeps rising but I don’t feel an improvement in the service.”
After collecting our information, we spent another half day on organising the data with UX strategies, including an affinity map, an empathy map and a solutions mind map. In the end, we reached a project focus we thought we could solve:
How might we incorporate the latest technology to create a user experience which is safe, time-efficient and pleasant in the Mexico City metro?
We reached a conclusion that the majority of Mexico City users are millenial women and so we created a user persona which would reflect the reality, and illustrated how she lives her day through a user profile, a customer journey map and a hand-drawn storyboard.
What we focused on as possible solutions
Given that our user persona “Claudia” felt frustrations around bad signage, inefficient ticketing and service delays, we came up with a list of solutions for her centred around an automated metro (of which already exist in cities such as São Paolo and Santiago de Chile.)
Our futures were to implement a new public transport system (such as an above-ground light rail) to relieve pressure on the metro, and to offer economic incentives to those who travel out of peak hour.
It felt like a lot of work to carry out in a few days’ sprint but it was great to see that we could reach insights and meaningful conclusions in such little time, which we could later apply to digital solutions. If we had more time, we would have interviewed more people and created a prototype of the optimised mobile app which we had in mind. In the end, I learnt that no issue is to large to tackle — especially when you have the right tools at hand.
