Ironhack’s Pre-Work: Design Thinking and Prototyping Challenge
My first challenge before attending the Ironhack Bootcamp was to practice my Design Thinking skills by creating a prototype for Citymapper app.
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.
Especially when you are traveling, an app like Citymapper could be really helpful to explore a new City. But researching all the needed information (ticket prices, best routes etc.)and buying the different tickets are just two steps on the stressful way to reach your goal. Purchasing the different amount of tickets the user will need can be very frustrating and instead of going on a sightseeing trip you will loose valuable time in front of a vending machine.
Although Citymapper solves some of the main problems of the urban mobility, an easy feature when it comes to things like pricing or purchasing the correct ticket by different channels is not developed yet. So my task was to create a feature that solves this problem and find quick and user-friendly solution that makes urban transportation experience more accesabale.
In order to find a quick and easy solution I followed the Design Thinking process which ideas was born in the 60’s and made popular by David M. Kelley while working by his company IDEO in 1991.
- Empathize
Human-centered innovation begins with developing an understanding of customers’ or users’ unmet or unarticulated needs. So I determined the audience whom who I am designing for:
- public transport users
- travellers
- urban explorers
After determining my audience I identified some key characteristics of them:
- wants to have flexible transportation options to choose
- very likely not staying long
- don’t know the city
I continued with 5 interviews to get a more detailed insight of the pain points users have when using a transportation app abroad.
2. Define
On the basis of the information obtained in the interviews, I summarized some main pain points users are faced with:
- Not a all-in-one app: for route planning and purchasing tickets often different apps have to be used
- Payment method/purchasing a ticket can often be time consuming, stressful and confusing: queues, lack of knowledge which ticket to buy, vending machines are not working or no credit card payment possible
- Public transport tickets come in paper or plastic cards: not environmentally friendly, could get lost or misplaced
The feature that needs to be created should allow the user to get information about the cheapest, easiest and fastet way to get from A to B and uncompletely purchasing a ticket at the same time.
3. Ideate
With all this knowledge in mind, I brainstormed trough some ideas and got to a user-friendly solution with some requirements listed below:
- multimodal choices of transportation devices
- in-app ticket purchasing by offering different payment methods
- top up option for later ticket buying
4. Prototype
The feature offers the users an in-app possibility to purchase a ticket after choosing one of the suggested route options. In addition, the user is able to top up an certain amount which can be used for buying tickets in the supported cities regardless of the currency. For both ways of purchasing- either top up or buy when you need- different methods of payment are offered to the user. As an extra, in every route option, points of interests could be displayed for the user when setting the filter for this option.
