What’s your public transportation experience like?

Ironhack prework — Design Thinking: Solving Citimapper’s most common user issue.

I am embarking on a new journey as a student of UX/UI design at Ironhack. For our first User Experience challenge we were asked to use the “Design Thinking Process” to take a closer look at the Citymapper app and solve one of their common user issues. Before we get into the nitty gritty of this project let me first give you a brief background of the client: Citymapper.

“Citymapper is a public transit app and mapping service which displays transport options, usually with live timing, between any two locations in a supported city. It integrates data for all urban modes of transport, including walking, cycling and driving, in addition to public transport. It is free of charge to users, and is supported by a mobile app on devices such as mobile phones, and by an Internet website.”

The Problem:

Although the current Citimapper app already solves some of the main problems of the urban mobility, there is one pain point for many users: the different amount of public transport tickets the users have to purchase.

Public transport tickets come in paper or plastic cards. Very often buying different public transport tickets is necessary to go from point A to B. And the process of buying these tickets can be very annoying (queues, vending machines that don’t work, etc.).

Finally, things like pricing or purchasing the correct ticket can become a real pain when you are abroad.

The Scope of This Project:

Citimapper’s mobile app allows the users to select a starting point and a destination, and the app provides different multi-modal routes with the estimated time and the cost of them.

My task is to create a feature for the existing app that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels. Keeping in mind that users already have all their information on the app, they will neither need to login nor enter any data when paying/checking-out. For now, we will forget about security issues and other limitations and just focus on finding a quick, user-friendly and creative solution.

Earlier I briefly referenced the “Design Thinking Process.” Assuming you, the reader, doesn’t know what this is (because I didn’t until now…) I am going to quickly break it down for you. First, what is “Design Thinking?” At its core, it is a protocol for solving complex problems and discovering new opportunities, by devising desirable solutions for clients/users.”

Design thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional.
- Ideo

Design thinking suggests that for creating innovative, valuable products or ideas, you need to follow 5 steps:

1. Empathize: get a good understanding who you’re designing for.
2. Define: define a problem statement focusing on the user’s viewpoint.
3. Ideate: use brainstorming techniques to generate as many ideas as possible in order to solve the problem.
4. Prototype: validate your best idea by testing it in a quick and illustrative way.
5. Test: solutions in front of people to see what works and what doesn’t so that you can use the feedback to refine it.

Now that that’s all taken care of, let’s get to it!

My process:

The first step to solving any problem is to talk to people who use public transportation. Thankfully, most of my friends are avid travelers so I had a good group to question. I decided that I wanted a wide array of samples so I didn’t just stick to those who use public transit regularly, but interviewed people across the board in order to get a wider perspective. I interviewed 6 of my friends ranging from avid travelers, to city travelers, to former city travelers and those who don’t travel much. I quickly saw some recurring themes throughout the interviews.

1. Most people like to purchase one or two way tickets…here is the kicker…at the station kiosk! ← — — Ok, so I was just as surprised as you are right now…at the station kiosk? Are we back in the 90s? Did these people forget that computers and smart phones exist?! So now that I got that out of my system we can proceed.
2. Like me, a good portion of the people I interviewed, also prefer to use ride sharing apps when they travel, and often even in their day-to-day lives. They find them to be convenient, easy to use, and generally affordable.

Like I stated above, I found that most people would rather purchase public transit tickets directly at the station and they just buy tickets that are one or two-way. Some people who travel more often said that they like to just load up their transit card with a fixed amount in order to have more flexibility. I also gathered that most of my interviewees prefer to use Google over apps in order to find the best routes around domestic AND foreign cities….hmmm very interesting….

So, how can I apply this to the Citymapper problem?

Let’s take the “old school” approach and bust out some sketches in pencil and paper.

This is my idea process…pretty messy…now imagine my brain…eeek!

This process helped me to come up with some ideas on how to solve Citimapper’s main customer complaint AND make my friends happy.

This is what I came up with (in case you can’t read my chicken scratch):

1. Add a wallet feature so that people can purchase tickets and passes and save them right in the app.
2. Add a “bank” housed within the wallet where people can add dollar amounts for ease of future purchases.
3. Include a discount for people paying directly with the app.
4. Include prices for all the tickets and passes right in the app.
5. Create a QR Code that can be scanned by all public transport formats.
6. Add Ride Sharing options like Uber and Lyft to the app and include ways to combine the ride sharing with public transport. (For example, you could take an Uber from the airport to a specific train that then will take you to your final destination. This provides flexibility and an opportunity to save some money on long trips.)

Next it was time to test out this hypothesis (like in Middle School Science class). I created a prototype of what the app would look like if I added these new features. Here is my prototype:

After creating my low-fidelity prototype I realized that I bit off more than I could chew trying to include ALL the new features I came up with. This was one of my main takeaways. I learned that as a designer I should tackle one task at a time. I got really excited and tried to implement everything into my prototype and wound up overwhelmed. So in my sketches featured above, you will see that I really focused on the passes and wallet. The ride sharing options will have to wait for the Citimapper app update (See what I did there? :::She quickly pulls out the finger guns and shoots you a wink::::).

Thank you for taking the time to read my FIRST Medium post. I hope it was insightful and didn’t bore you to death. Keep a look out for some posts to come!