Ironhack Challenge #1: Design Thinking
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ETA: 20 days. That’s how many days left until I take a beautiful risk and commit to a full-time boot camp that will last 10 weeks. The goal is to add a new skill and evolve as a marketer or make a change to become a product designer or a product manager. Only time will tell what I’ll become. Well, also the decisions I’ll make and the opportunities that will appear. Anyway, this is the Genesis.
OVERDRAMATIZATION FADE OUT: CUT TO Can sitting on an office chair.
The first challenge of the Bootcamp Pre-Work is to apply Design Thinking Principles to solve a business problem for the ultimate transport app, Citymapper. Their goal is to solve the urban mobility problems by offering the quickest and cheapest public and private transport routes to their users.
Citymapper is pretty neat when it comes to suggesting routes that will get you from point A to Point B, informing you about timetables, and presenting all this in a sleek and direct interface. You have different options that involve the bus, metro, train, walking, taxi, cycling. You can select various combinations that make sense for you. That’s very convenient for planning.
But they could be doing so much better. How? By owning more of the experience and improving the post-planning stage. The stage that bugs the most people: buying different public transport tickets from different sources at different stages.
The purchase process comes with a lot of friction in environments where controlling the experience is difficult. It’s time to follow the design thinking to come up with a solution.
Stage 1: Empathize
First, I did some personal introspection came up with the following answers to the respective questions.
- What problem are you solving?
The problem is having to buy different tickets for different legs of the trip for the user. It can be annoying to wait in queues, you might have to deal with a broken machine… The list goes on when it comes to inconveniences you can experience. So in the end, it’s an inconvenience problem that might have functional, emotional, and maybe even micro-social impacts. But in retrospect, I see that this is also a control and measurement problem for the business. Making users purchase tickets from a physical environment reduces your control over the experience and makes it super difficult to measure what you might need to improve it.
- Who’s your audience?
The audience is public and private transport users and who have smartphones.(I’m taking both the existing and potential users into account).
- Who’s your client’s competition?
Transit, Moovit, Rome2rio, OneBusAway, Transportr, Google Maps, Waze, UrbanGo
- What’s the tone/ feeling?
The app has a neutral feel to it in terms of emotions and the focus seems to be on delivering smooth functionality.
After answering the questions above I conducted 5 interviews. All of the interviewees are between the ages of 25 and 35. They are white-collar workers who lived abroad before and still travel at least a couple times each year.
I focused on discovering their pain points and listened to their experiences about using public or private transportation abroad.
Stage 2: Define
The main issues that were mentioned were:
- Time: Difficulty locating the ticket machines, waiting in queues and losing time
- Confusion: Complex ticket purchasing process causing lost time, confusion, and unsuccessful trips(one interviewee mentioned having to go until the final station on a route instead of her desired stop and spending an extra hour on the trip)
- Storage: Losing paper tickets, not durable tickets getting damaged, having to carry multiple tickets in their wallets or purses, finding the ticket, and every time they have to use it and getting annoyed. One interviewee mentioned his frustration by saying: “I don’t like carrying tons of s#!+ in my wallet!”
- Money problems: Carrying any cash, coins and going to exchange offices only to get some local currency to buy tickets and getting a return on remaining credit when they’re about to leave the country
- Environmental impact of paper tickets
Next thing to do was to frame the problem with as statement that is neither too broad nor too narrow.
Young professionals need a seamless ticket purchasing experience when they’re abroad because the current way of doing this in the physical world comes with lost time, confusion and inconvenience.
Stage 3: Ideation
The answers I got during the interviews once again made it clear that my generation’s desire to achieve things with no delay or deferment was a crucial need that had to be satisfied. Basically changing vehicles, having different platforms to plan a route, buy the tickets and everything in between is a bit too much for 1-click order junkies like us. Damn you Amazon!
I asked the interviewees some follow up questions about their preferred methods of payment to see how the experience could be improved.
So as The O’Jays sang:
Stage 4: Prototype
I’m not the best with a pen I get it :(
But I believe the idea was to put something on paper to communicate ideas and be creative in a fast manner to see what works and what doesn’t at this stage.
