Challenge 1: Design Thinking
As a student of Ironhack UX/UI, I have to apply the Disign Thinking in my fisrt challenge about a real case.
BACKGROUND
Citymapper is an app that provides real-time information about public transportation and shows the best route to reach the destination chosen by the user.
You can search for how to travel from point A to point B and the app will show you the different types of transportation there are, schedules, even which train car you will have to go on. It also suggests which route is the fastest or the shortest.
The main competitor of this app is Google Maps, since they work very similarly, and with the solution that I propose throughout this challenge, I think CityMapper could take advantage.
EMPATHIZE AND DEFINE THE PROBLEM
I wanted to interview people who use this app, but Citymapper is not very common in my city (a small city near Barcelona), so I’ve talked to people who use public transport eventually and I have asked them about how they usually buy the tickets.
I’ve preferred to choose this target, because people who use public transport daily already have a routine and know perfectly well the way to travel and the route.
In my opinion, these types of apps are for people who occasionally take public transport, who don’t fully know the city where they are going or perhaps don’t know the language.
The main problem that my interviewees have in common is that there are so many different types of public transport (train, subway, bus, tram, railways, etc.) added to the variety of tickets you can buy ( occasional, monthly, 24h, weekly, one-way, etc). They think that’s difficult the task of traveling quickly by public transport.
Some interviewees were left with the feeling of overpaying or having had the wrong type of ticket.
When I read for the first time this activity I felt identified, because when I traveled to Naples I knew where I had to go but it was not clear to me where I had to buy the ticket to go to Pompeii or what type of ticket I needed, and it took me more than half an hour wandering around through the train station, since that station served trains, metro and buses and it was really complicated.
IDEATE
Paying for train tickets with your mobile phone is the most convenient, in my opinion it is the most used payment option among young people.
I thought that nowadays most of us pay with contactless and we have our wallet on our mobile phone with our different credit cards.
That’s why my idea consists of having a virtual credit card in the mobile wallet app, with a rechargeable credit and also having it linked in the Citymapper app.
Once the ticket has been purchased from the app, it will appear in our wallet app and we can validate it at the station with contactless support.
In the case of transport without contactless, a QR code will also appear on our virtual card to be able to validate the ticket with a QR Reader.
PROTOTYPE
Below I show you how to select a route, the departure and arrival time, the payment method, which in this case is with the virtual credit card but it could also be with Paypal or your bank card, and finally how the ticket would appear in the wallet app.
CONCLUSION
I think that this extra tool in an app like Citymapper can make a trip more enjoyable, even encouraging you to use transportation more and move around without fear of not knowing how to come back later or how to buy tickets with the language barrier.
This would encourage, in part, tourism with the benefits that this entails. Tourism without worrying about not finding where buy the tickets and missing the train because of it would be fantastic!
While I was doing this activity I understood the importance of empathizing with the user to know what is the real problem.
I liked drawing the prototype, although I did it with my limited knowledge about UX/UI, so I want to learn to see what else I can do.
Thanks for reading if you made it to the end!
Celia.
