Design Thinking: UrbanGo Solution
Ironhack Prework. Challenge 1.
UrbanGo is a public transit and mapping startup 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 to their users.
What’s the problem?
UrbanGo solves many problems of urban mobility: for example, when users select a starting point and a final destination, the app provides different multimodal routes with estimated time and its cost.
But sometimes the users need to buy more than a ticket to move from one spot to another and that brings up many different problems:
- Tickets are physics usually made of paper, that means you can lost them or ruin them easily during the trip;
- The selling machines line can be really long specially on a rush hour;
- If you find yourself on another country it’s usually difficult to understand which tickets you have to buy depending on the different zones in the city;
- There can also be paying problems at the selling machines.
The scope of this project is to create a feature for this app that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.
Users Interviews
I have interviewed five different users aged between 20 and 30 years old actually studying or recently working.
The questions asked at the interview were the following ones:
- Do you usually take the public transport or you prefer a private one?
- Do you use any app to choose your daily route? If the answer is yes which one?
- Would you buy a ticket or a virtual pass using an app?
The users live in different cities and they use the public transport daily to move from one spot to another of the city or move to the headquarters. The app which have been more used to control the route on the less time possible are Google Maps and City Mapper.
Some of them use the official city transport app to buy tickets but normally those use different apps for the different public transport on the city (metro, train) and it can be really uncomfortable to manage.
Also all the interviewed people love to travel away and many times they have found some difficulties choosing the right ticket, the language or the payment method.
Finding a Solution
After the investigation process here comes a solution proposal for the different issues founded:
- Add a payment system (creditcard, paypall, apple pay, google pay, etc.) where the operation will be memorized on the app and the payment will be immediately
- QR code
- Ticket refreshment about the validation timing
The scope will be to create an app with easy access and easily to scan a QR code which helps the user to just open the app and pass it through the control point.
Conclusions
The Design Thinking process it’s a nice way to face different kind of problems because it doesn’t focus just on the problem but its context.
It’s also useful because thanks to the interviews it gives you a closer way to empathize with the user and understand its needs related to the product.
Finally after accomplish this challenge I have learned what’s necessary to think about and analyze every scenario to get a nice result which can adapt to any user on the best possible way.
