Design Thinking- Citymapper: Challenge 1

Corporative Image from the enterprise.

Introduction

Citymapper is a public transport and mapping startup that aims to solve the main problems of urban mobility by offering the quickest and cheapest public and private transport routes to their users, but there is a pain point that many users are facing: the purchasing of the tickets needed to commute or travel around the city. Every city has its own rules and public transport system, and the process of purchasing those tickets can be very annoying; queues, vending machines that don’t work, stores that only open at a certain time, etc. Not to mention the pain that can be buying the correct ticket when you are abroad.

At Ironhack, a tech school, we were asked to create a feature of this app that would solve the pain of having to purchase different public transport by different channels.

The Problem

We are trying to solve the process of acquiring tickets for transportation. Most of time users have to face different situations to purchase the tickets needed to go to the destination they wanted.

1. EMPATHIZE

COMPETITORS RESEARCH

Citymapper has many competitors, all of them offer similar mapping and route planning services, each one with its own strengths. Lets see some:

• Google Maps: It is one of the most used web mapping apps around the world. It offers the possibility to guide you during your route by car, by foot, by bike, public transport, etc. It shows you different options to move from point A to point B, public transport lines and schedules. But sometimes public transport timetable is not very accurate. However traffic conditions in real life are very precise.
• Rome2Rio: it is a multimodal transport planner. It shows you how to get from point A to point B, all different options you have, time required and even price. You can plan your local trip and also a long one. The interface is a bit confusing regarding the purchase of tickets, you must scroll down to know how to buy tickets. Furthermore, you cannot buy local transport tickets, just planes and trains.
• Moovit: As well as the other apps this app will allow you to plan your route throughout a city. It will show you the best options, your arrival time, incidents you could find on your way and it lets you buy the transport ticket to your destination.
• Cabify, Uber, Bike rentals, local public transport, Blablacar are other competitors that could help us during our research.

USER RESEARCH

For getting quality information about our users I interviewed 5 of them. They are aged between 25–35 and they are users of public transport in different countries. With this research we wanted to answer the following questions:

• What is essential about purchasing a transport ticket?
• What are the current pain points of users?
• How do users currently buy a ticket?
• Do the users already use a digital platform to buy their tickets? How do they interact with it?
• How do users feel about existing products?

I created a research plan to conduct these interviews and make the best of this process. The research include:

• The background: a small description with all the reasons why I was doing this research.
• Research goals: the main goals to do it.
• Research questions: what do we want to answer with this research.
• Method: the method I would use to achieve it ( a one-person interview, a survey, etc).
• Recruiting: How many users we would like to interview and what characteristics should they have.
• Script: Here is where we have the script we want to follow throughout the interviews.

Based on the interviews I made, I found I have 3 types of users, so I made a user persona for each one of them, we will see the personas later.

2. DEFINE

After the interviews I found out some pain points, desires and what they like about the existing methods. This can be summarized in the following chart:

USER PERSONAS

As we said before, we have defined 3 types of users we would like to address. A user persona is a made-up representation of our ideal user. In this user persona, we will show the demographic profile, their needs and preferences, their pain points and behaviours, the objectives they intend to achieve with your product, etc. This information is gathered from previous research.

• The townsfolk that have lived in the city for a while and are used to the transport system.

• The tourists who arrive in a new city and want to explore it.

• The new citizens that have just arrived in a new city and have to get used to the city rules and transportation system.

3. IDEATE

Taking into consideration the users pain points and desires, I brainstormed different possibilities and I came up with different solutions:

• The users need to feel guided and safe, so we want to develop a virtual assistant that would help them throughout the process.
• Users should have the possibility to buy a single ticket, a monthly ticket or a card that could be used everywhere and anytime.
• Most of the transportation systems are being used by contact less or are changing to this system. I think it is the easier way to do it so I would implement it in the app.
• A good option would be a card that should be top up in the same app and that could be used worldwide.

4. PROTOTYPE

I designed this prototype to help the users throughout the process of purchasing a transport ticket and saving it in the app.

CONCLUSION

I have really enjoyed the whole process. From my humble point of view the Design Thinking process is really helpful. At the beginning, I was not so comfortable with the idea of making interviews. I thought I could do it myself, I did not like the idea of disturbing someone to help me with the process, but after this challenge I found out that I really liked it. I was really surprised with the answers of my interviewees, the pain points they faced during their daily routines with transportation, and it helped me to see the problem from their point of view.. It is true that you are NOT your user.

Thank you for your reading and if you have any advice just let me know.