Barcelona Metrocard Redesign — a UX/UI case study
Plastic chip sensor Metro cards would decrease traffic jams during prime riding hours, increase sustainability efforts and overall riding experiences. I transformed sketches and ideas from the team ideation period and made them into the digital products.
My Role: User Interviews, Sketching, Wireframing, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Figma Prototyping, 3D Modeling
Team: Ilma Bilic, Kelly Chang, Ruma Deb, Maheru Jahania, Sejal Lal, Jamie Neumann
Year: 2019 | Duration: 1 Day
PROBLEM
Metro riding experiences in Barcelona are frustrating. In order to ride the user has to buy a paper card from the kiosk then insert the card into the turnstile machine, which can be timely. The paper cards easily wrinkle, tear and become unreadable. Along with this, users don’t like taking the cards out of their bags/wallets and don’t know how many swipes they have left.
What does the current metro system look like?
In order to redesign the system, I had to understand what users enjoy, hate and need from the metro. To do this, the team and I conducted interviews with users and evaluated the system as a whole.
Currently, users have the option to buy paper tickets through kiosks. The user inserts their card into the turnstile and it spits the card back out to allow the user to enter the metro.
Who did we interview?
We collectively interviewed 11 people about their experiences using the metro. Most of our users were younger and weren’t completely fluent in English, so there may be bias in the results collected.
Synthesis: Affinity Diagram
Based on data from in-person interviews, I organized the teams' observations and categorized them using an affinity diagram. This helped me expose pain points and user needs throughout the whole process of using the metro system. It also helped the team and I understand the complexity revolved around redesigning a system as large and intricate as the metro.
Persona
Using the organized data from the affinity diagram, I was able to develop a persona, which represents the user we had in mind when re-designing the metro.
Brainstorm
Collectively the team came up with initial sketches based on the user feedback we collected. Our main priority was to focus on the card design, as it was a clear pain point in the metro experience. We then moved on to the mobile and turnstile redesign to match the card features.
Prototype
From the sketching phase, the team collectively discussed what features and design ideas should be built upon. My role involved taking these initial sketches and elevating them into digital products that users could immerse themselves in.
Final Design
Metrocard
The entrance into the metro is one of the most stressful parts of the riding experience. By introducing the chip reader, barcode scanner and plastic durable material we are meeting the users' needs. Users no longer have to wait for a kiosk to reload their cards or even pull their cards out of their pockets. They simply walk through the turnstile detector and easily access the metro in a sustainable and effortless way.
Mobile App
Upon doing research, I found out that the metro system in Barcelona had an app that showed arrival times and allowed users to buy tickets online. Instead of redesigning the whole app, the team and I realized it would be better to adjust the current design to match the feature set we included in our card and turnstile design. This was purely a decision we made due to our time constraint. Utilizing Figma, I implemented the barcode, rides remaining, transfer time, and payment options. Our users really wanted to have the option of using their phones as a way of putting money on their MetroCards, this feature is highlighted in the tickets tab. Given more time, I would redesign the whole app to match the metro branding and style.
Turnstile
Turnstiles create the most traffic jams due to the slow turnaround of inserting the metro card and waiting for it to come out of the machine. This redesign aims to decrease the amount of time it takes to scan a MetroCard in order to increase the flow of traffic. Utilizing two methods of entering, the chip reader and barcode scanner, users can effortlessly enter the metro. The signal sensor on the side of the machine scans the chip reader, allowing the user to just walk through without having to pull out their card from their pockets or purses. If the chip reader were to malfunction, the secondary entry method, the barcode scanner, can be used to scan both the card and mobile barcodes.
