Challenge 1: Design Thinking

The company:

UrbanGo is a public transit and mapping app based in Silicon Valley. Their goal is to solve the problems of urban mobility by offering the quickest and cheapest public and private transport routes. This app enables users to plan their route using mapping. The user has the option of choosing the mode of transport, this added to the distance of the journey calculates how much it will cost.

The Problem:

When a user moves in public transport around the city often has to take different types of transportation, sometimes this means buying different tickets in vending machines or other places, this becomes a big effort and is also time consuming. Imagine this user in a different city facing the same problems, this would be a nightmare.

During the interviews I found another problem. Some of my users complained about making to many connections during the same trip, they also said they would prefer to be a bit late and make more connections in the same transport avoiding jumping from train to metro and back, this way they feel the trip less inconvenient and relax.

The main part of the users said they don’t mind to write their bank information in the App once, but they don’t want to be asked for it every time, so the information should be in the profile, and the App should never ask for this anymore.

The Solution:

When we take a trip from A to B the App already show us the number of connections, the time this would take, the price, and many other details.

• For solving the multi ticket issue, my idea would be to separate inside the App as many tickets the user needs and show them in the shape of e-tickets with the trip info, the username, and a QR code to be scanned if needed.
• In the second problem I had the solution of separate each route in three categories, I named them this way:

Quick: The App shows you the fastest way to arrive from one point to another.

Comfort: This mode gives the user less connections and avoids as much as possible changing transportation methods.

Economy: Prioritize the money in front of everything.

• For the payment method the App must have the credit card information linked to each profile, this way the App would make the electronic payments to the transportation companies.

The Prototype:

Conclusions:

It was hard to make good questions not leading in to a conclusion, or a YES or NO answer. With the practice I became a bit more comfortable with my questions, and I was able to let the user extend their answers, arriving this way into more conclusions and unexpected problems.

These issues would seem a problem at first but became an asset for the App once solved.

With the Prototype I became aware of the amount of screens, buttons and links in one App. Having to rethink many steps in orther to minimize the number of screens and make a more friendly experience.