IronHack pre-work 1/3: Design Thinking

CityMapper is an app that aims at easing the user’s experience while using public transportations abroad. When moving around in a city abroad can often become a real struggle due to one’s poor knowledge of the transportation network, CityMapper provides the possibility to check one’s itinerary in advance with a high level of details (type of transportation, timetable, price), therefore saving stress, energy and time for the user. However, there is one experience step that CityMapper hasn’t integrated yet in its suite of service : the purchase and payment of the public transportation ticket. A step that can indeed turn out as quite a struggle, especially abroad.

In this exercise, I will be using the design thinking process to come up with concrete recommendations for CityMapper to implement a purchase and payment service, and therefore uplift the user’s experience.

Step 1: Empathize

To understand precisely to what extent buying a physical ticket is a pain point in the public transportation experience, I conducted 5 interviews among people who recently used public transportation in a city outside home. During the interviews, I asked the user to relate exactly his last purchase of ticket from the moment he identified where to buy it until the moment he used this ticket. At each step (identification of the selling point, using the machine, payment), I probed on the pain and softer points. As a conclusion, the user was also welcome to share some websites that digitalized the purchase of ticket as inspiration.

Step 2: Define

Three main problems were raised throughout the interviews:

• Buying physical tickets is time consuming: When visiting a city, the last thing users want is to lose time and invest energy in meaningless problems. To that extent, vending machines (which may have seemed revolutionary 20 years ago though) are often making the experience long and energy consuming for the user, as users have to : Queue ; Get to know how the machine works (each city has its own system) ; And the machine is sometimes working very slow or breaks down in the middle of the manipulation
• Several channels to use = several tickets to buy: Often when switching from one channel to the other (E.g. first the metro then switch for the bus) implies buying another ticket with all the pain points quoted above such as queueing, get to understand a new machine, facing technical issues. Therefore the journey gets once again longer and more complicated. Moreover, information regarding this new ticket to buy rule is not always salient, so users -without even realizing it- can find themselves defrauding not on purpose.
• Paying in cash, not aligned with young people habits: A problem that mostly occurs in the bus (sometimes in tram) where the payment is to be done by the driver in cash, even sometimes the exact amount in coins is needed. Most of my interviewees agreed to say that they do not carry small coins around anymore. Therefore, this can trigger stress (will I have to jump out of the bus then? Should I continue by walking instead?…) and a loss of time (E.g. Go to an ATM to withdraw cash)

These problems all converge into one same problem in the end: time management. Buying a physical ticket make users lose time.

Step 3: Ideate

To address that problem, I sketched the mind map below

3 ideas emerged:

A. To scan a QR code directly at the station that will lead to a page to buy tickets on the CityMapper app

. Pros: Can lead non-user of the CityMapper on the app, a great visibility opportunity

. Cons: Scanning a QR code is not really an habit in Europe (vs Asia) ; purchasing online at the station may still take some time therefore turn into a pain point

B. To be able to buy the ticket when checking an itinerary on CityMapper. With 2 options:

B. 1. Get a QR code as a digital ticket and stored directly in the app

. Pros: Possibility to get ONE ticket for the whole itinerary, extremely time effective as everything is ready once the user gets to the station

. Cons: the whole transportation network infrastructures must be able to read this QR code, may take a long time to implement

B. 2. Get a QR code that enables to withdraw a physical ticket at the station

. Pros: the whole transportation network infrastructures does not have to adapt to a QR code as the user will be using a physical ticket

. Cons: A physical intermediary at the station remains therefore not the most time effective

C. To create a CityMapper chatbot in Messenger, Whatsapp… to get the digital ticket directly sent to a personal email address

. Pros: Possibility to get ONE ticket for the whole itinerary, extremely time effective as everything is ready once the user gets to the station

. Cons: All users do not have the chatbot culture

Step 4: prototype

Below are the sketches I drew for the solution B.1.

When looking for an itinerary, the user is offered to purchase online ONE ticket for the whole trip (even if it combines different channels).

Key Learnings

I drew 2 main learnings from this exercise:

First, I realized that an app is a part of a whole ecosystem and therefore the solutions that it offers should always remain consistent to the constraints of its environment. Typically, in the case of the prototype above, the purchase service online will only be valid if the whole transportation network infrastructure of a city make the scanning of QR codes possible.

Second, from a purely designer point of view, I discovered that sketching is not as easy as it seems. Lettering should not be too big to fit in a case for instance. This seems silly but it can ruin your sketch if you take it the wrong way!