Urban Go| a UX case study

Challenge 1 | Ironhack UX/UI Bootcamp.

Solving the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.

“This is my first day of vacation, I finally made it to my destination! Excited to explore the city, first thing in the morning I headed to the train station, I always use public transport since it is much more affordable than private transport. I really wanted to be early for my first stop, but I still had to buy the tickets, so I scheduled to leave home at least 30 minutes earlier.
When I got to the station, I immediately saw the ticket machines, they were easy to find, followed by a long waiting line to buy the tickets.

After some waiting, finally, it was my turn, and fortunately, there is an option in English, imagine how difficult it would be to find out everything in Dutch, oh my God!
Too early to celebrate, the machine only accepts cash payments and I didn’t have time to get cash. Damn, More effort.

I then go to the counter, where there are people selling tickets, I get in line again, and anxiety fills my body, I hope that some of them can understand me in English and that I can pay using my credit card, which would make everything simpler.

As an experienced traveler, I find a way to explain where I am going, ask a few questions about the types of tickets and routes, time guidelines, and which platform I should wait for the train. these questions turned into a nightmare when I noticed that no one there could understand me. It’s okay, I guess I can find out online.
They give me a flimsy paper card, which can be recharged, and after an hour at the train station, I finally get to the right platform and am ready to start my day exploring the area. I´m excited for my vacation, but I couldn´t help wondering why the process had to be so complicated, and if there was a better way?“

The perspective of an Use experience by Fran, 24,traveler.

This story, whilst just an illustration, highlights many of the common challenges encountered when using public transport.

Urban Go, an innovative Silicon Valley startup, has become a life saver for travelers and frequent users of public transport.

Urban Go Interface

The Urban Go app has been solving painstaking problems of urban mobility in the public and private transport sector. They claim to offer users the fastest and cheapest transport routes to their users, making it easy to go from A to B, regardless of your transportation type.

Whilst Urban Go is improving the transportation efficiency for countless users, they´ve appeared to have forgotten some simple, yet important features which could be easily implemented to improve the user experience.

Having this in mind my task is to create new features for this app addressing particular pain points involved with the ticket purchasing process. I intend to address these aspects with a strong focus on Design Thinking for optimizing the user´s experience.

Design Thinking: a non-linear process

Empathize — Researching my Users’ Needs

First I tried to understand my target audience. What are their thoughts? How is their experience using public transport, especially abroad?

I started with scripted questions for my interviewees about public transport and their experience using it. I placed my focus on listening to what they had to say and grouped together common themes to gain a big-picture understanding of the problems at hand.

By interviewing the group and letting them explain their feelings I gained real insights directly from the source. Among the people interviewed, the ages ranged from 20 to 35 years, some were everyday users and others predominantly used transport when abroad.

The Research was key to define and state the user's needs and problems.

Define — What are my user’s needs and problems?

Using the information gathered from my research, I will categorize and analyze the data to define the core problems.

• Travelers have mentioned that when abroad in some destinations the public transport service is confusing and complicated. Because of this they often opted to take private transport even if they had to pay more. They valued simplicity of use and being able to travel door to door over cost, deeming the added expense “worth it” for reduced stress.
• Travelers often faced a language barrier when buying tickets, resulting in miscommunications, added stress and inaccurate information about tickets, schedules and prices.
• Varied ticket purchasing options across cities and countries create friction due to the constant learning curve on how and what ticket to purchase.
• Paper tickets, barcodes, top-ups, and other cumbersome technologies were listed as inefficient for regular everyday users.
• Queues to purchase tickets often had long wait lines, adding unnecessary time to the user's journey…imagine knocking off an extra 30 minutes from your daily commute with one simple fix: Not having to wait in line to buy your ticket.

Considering the above pain points, a major underlying problem became clear.

The common methods for buying tickets are inefficient.

Ticket purchasing is time consuming and overcomplicated whether you are a traveler abroad or an everyday user.

Ideate — Time to generate ideas!

I wanted my idea to be a cure, not a treatment. I had to introduce a scalable, user friendly idea that worked for a wide range of transportation system accross the globe. Following a mind map, I found the common problems were related to Time and Effort.

Keeping this in mind I came up with the following ideas:

• The feature should include Information about the city, prices, routes and tickets.
• The ticket should be available to purchase online through the app, with multiple online payment options listed. Such options include PayPal, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and debit/credit cards.
• The feature should be multilingual, offering clear journey instructions for travelers abroad.
• The feature should show the current traffic conditions so users can plan their journey accordingly.
• The feature should include the option to save and schedule past routes for future journeys, removing the need to waste time and effort inputting information for journeys already traveled.
• The feature should offer users the option to sort journeys based on Price, Time, Duration or an overall best combination of all three.

Among all the ideas that the brainstorm brought up, I selected the three most relevant to test in the next step.

• The ticket should be available to purchase online through the app, with multiple online payment options listed. Such options include PayPal, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and debit/credit cards.
• The feature should include the option to save and schedule past routes for future journeys, removing the need to waste time and effort inputting information for journeys already traveled.
• The feature should be multilingual, offering clear journey instructions for travelers abroad.

Prototype — Let’s get the hands dirty

The three solutions listed above, whilst simple, offer powerful solutions to the two main problems listed: Time and Effort.

For these 3 features, I create this first prototype you can check below.

This is my first Prototype, so please don’t sass me… Actually, I’m a designer, so sass me I need feedback.

A few key things that I learned throughout this process.

I can’t say was easy, but definitely rewarding at the end. At each stage, I could learn a lot about the process.

I really enjoyed the interview part I encouraged my interviewees to tell everything they wanted, every detail, and emotion. Is easy to have your own assumptions about the problem, when you are not listening. By asking the right questions I could listen and learn from their answers.

Conceiving the idea was also a big challenge for me. What is the main problem to be solved? Is this relevant to the user? It took me a while to really understand that I should focus on keeping this simple, not try to achieve perfection immediately.

When you feel that your ideas are not good enough, is easy to feel tired or frustrated. I got through this process many times until I realized that it's okay we are able to improve ideas by testing and talking with people and the initial “not so good idea” might lead you to the greatest idea you have ever had.

To conclude, I’m very proud of the small achievements through my work and that keeps me going.

If you read till the end and just like me want to learn more UX Design,
I highly recommend this Open source Library.
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature