UXMK: UX for Transport and Mobility

Thank you to everyone who came to the UXMK event on Thursday last week. It was great to see you all there and we left feeling really inspired and motivated!

Special thanks to Volkswagen Financial Services for hosting and the three brilliant speakers: Lucy Yu, Steve Mulvey and James Gleave.

We all had a chance to meet, get acquainted and network before the speakers with some delicious food provided by staff at Volkswagen Financial Services.

Why UX for transport and mobility?

Something we get asked a lot is: What is UX? UX is short for user experience, which is the way customers or users feel when they interact with your product or service from the beginning to the end.

Transport and mobility is an exciting place to be at the moment as it is changing a lot, with new services on the horizon such as Mobility-as-a-Service and products and infrastructure in development such as Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.

That’s why we wanted to bring these two interesting topics together!

The event explored UX, design thinking and user experience for the transport industry, including user-centred design for transport policy and the role of UX and design for new mobility products.

User Trials at FiveAI

Up first was Lucy Yu the Director of Public Policy at FiveAI.

Lucy opened with an interesting thought: cars are one of the only inanimate objects that we give names to. The top five names are Betty, Bob, Bert, Dave and Amy. Her talk discussed mobility as a service and the development of software which creates power shared, self-driving vehicles in Europe.

Lucy talked about the research conducted to explore the user experience of self-driving cars; from both other driver’s perspective and the perspective of the community and pedestrians. One study discussed involved a man dressed as a car seat to give the image of a self-driving car from the outside perspective! Her talk highlighted the importance of collecting the experiences of users to gather information and reactions on self-driving vehicles.

User-Focused Complex Products

Up next was Steve Mulvey, a Product Designer at Immense AI. Steve’s talk discussed scaling and democratising simulations.

He discussed the idea that ‘mobility is a universal need’ and that future mobility is complex and uncertain, therefore a design-thinking approach can help unlock new use cases. AI could therefore help to alleviate issues in transport and mobility by applying a design centered approach to thinking!

Users, Public and Community: Different Perspectives for Transport

Last, but by no means least, was James Gleave the Founder of Mobility Policy Lab.

James’ talk was about community, public and user needs in transport and how we need to concentrate less on users and more on citizens when having conversations about mobility as ‘people think and act differently as citizens than they do as users’.

James highlighted how users are more concerned with wants, whilst citizens are concerned with what will benefit the community. Therefore by framing the conversation differently and taking a citizen-centred, rather than a user-centred approach to mobility, this allows us to develop empathy for unseen users, for example those with disabilities and accessibility issues.

Online MK Tech Community through Tappter

Before closing we were also lucky to hear from Keith Banwaitt, co-Founder of Tappter who introduced Tappter as the app that joins individuals from a community together to network and socialize!

Given the expansion of the MK tech community, this is a great opportunity to connect with like minded individuals within the local area. To try it out; download the Tappter app and enter the unique access code which appeared at the UXMK event or that can be shared by our Managing Director Chloe.

We would just like to say another huge “thank you” to the speakers, host and attendees for a brilliant evening.

Future UXMK Events and UXMK Breakfast Club

There are some exciting events on the horizon that you won’t want to miss out on!

The next event is in May and will focus on Accessibility and Inclusion within design. It will be in the form of an interactive workshop led by UX Consultant, Helen Joy. Find out more here.

In September 2020, we will also have an event looking at UX for FinTech, with venue and speakers to be announced soon. It’s set to be great!

New for 2020 is our UXMK Breakfast Club which kicks on on February 11th and will run monthly at 8am-9:30am. More information will follow soon, but you can get your tickets here.

Team Snap Out ⛰️