Designing the future of the City Bicycle
How might we organize the variety of people navigating the streets to provide a more efficient and cleaner city?
The Project
HOPCYCLE is an alternative transport solution and companion app and the first project that I worked on during the Ironhack UX/UI Bootcamp. Working in a team of four, we designed this project from brief to mid-fi wireframe through UX research and Design Thinking.
Duration: 9 days
Methods: Secondary Research, User Interviews, Brainstorming, Affinity Mapping, User Persona and Journey creation, Crazy Eights, Idea Prioritization, User Flow, Wireframes
Tools: Figma, Mural, Whimsical
The brief
As the relationship between metropolis and rural areas is transforming, moving around the city has also witnessed transformation over the past years.
A huge variety of alternatives is emerging in the transportation field. At the same time, the streets have become a playground for exercise. How Might We organize the variety of people navigating the streets to provide a more efficient and cleaner city?
The Process
Research
Secondary Research
As the topic of the project is particularly complex and can be undertaken in a variety of ways, we started this project by doing Secondary Research to best understand what Urban Mobility means in 2021. I conducted target research on three main themes: Green Urban Transportation, Women’s Safety and Health.
These themes seem to be of top priority at the moment. May it be the COVID Pandemic, the #MeToo movement, or the climate crisis, it seemed to transpire that Health, Safety and Ecology are at the centre of innovation in the transport sector.
Following this individual secondary research, the team downloaded the data into a dedicated Mural and started organising it into overarching themes. These themes enabled us to create a User Interview Guide and split into teams of two to interview users about their experience navigating metropolitan hubs.
User Interviews
To understand how people navigate cities, their transport habits as well as their feelings doing so, the team interviewed 4 users from varying background. We wanted to understand how the users’ answers would vary according to their gender, where they grew up and reside currently, as well as how their transport habits had changed since the beginning of the pandemic and the arrival as of curfew in France as well as remote working.
Empathise
Key Findings & Insights
The secondary research and interviews helped us understand more about the needs and frustrations of city dwellers, enabling us to see 4 main points of interest emerge thanks to the Affinity Mapping technique:
- Infrastructure: Users often expressed frustrations with transport infrastructure, noting that cohabitation between man-powered and human-powered vehicles was very complicated due to the way cities were mapped out or old habits. Many complaints about the metro system also came about, particularly the quality of service or lack of accessibility.
- Personal Preferences: The topic of personal preference as a constraint also emerged. Users often expressed a preference to travel above ground in the fresh air, but economic or time constraints often led them to choose the metro as the city is planned out to make it more efficient. Users also expressed a love, yet dissatisfaction with the Vélib’ City Bike service. One user going so far as saying that the infrastructure and service in place made them lose the habit of using the bikes, even though they enjoyed them so much.
- Safety: May it be using Uber more than public transport as a way of travelling efficiently and safely at night, feeling afraid to bike during rush hour due to the traffic or experiencing violence in public transportation, users often expressed weariness when navigating their city.
- Open-air travel: Finally, many users noted a personal preference towards navigating cities in the fresh air. Disregarding pollution, city life is often inside. From home to the office, many noted that they prefer to use their commute time, if time isn’t a constraint, to experience the city in the open, get in some fresh air and exercise and make the most of their surroundings.
User Persona
To best remember the user during the rest of the Design Process, the team individually created a user persona from our research, brainstorming and user interviews. Following this step, we brainstormed and created a user persona. This user, Camille, is a young careerist city-lover. We revisited Camille often to remind ourselves of her needs and frustration and to keep the user at the heart of the rest of the project.
Define
User Journey
Finally, to understand Camille’s habits a bit more, we created her journey from home to work. This showed us not only her emotions during her commute but was also essential to view the main pain points and thus the design opportunities that we were able to expand on.
Problem Statement
Finally, thanks to the Empathise and Define steps we were able to focus on one main problem through our User. Through collaboration, brainstorming and defining thanks to semantics, we were able to arrive at the crux of the problem which is that Camille, an active careerist city-lover needs a way to feel safe cycling on her commute, because she is afraid of getting hurt by other travellers due to city infrastructure making cohabitation between man-powered and motor-powered transport difficult.
Ideate
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Safety and simplicity are at the center of Hopcycle.
This is why we designed clear, lo-fi wireframes to present our top feature of the Hopcycle app, which will enable the user to book a seat on the bike. The user then creates an account on the app, navigates to the booking feature, inputs her departure and arrival locations and chooses the time of departure. The app provides her with a set of journeys for her ride.
She will be able to select the journey she prefers, the closest to her home and to be in time for her 8:30 meeting. If the user wishes to book a helmet or add any other option like the opportunity to book a seat directly next to them, they can do so in two clicks with the Options feature.
Thanks to the pre-determined method of payment, they’re only one click away from their ride on HOPCYCLE!
Just as easy as H. O. P.
Retrospective
Key takeaways
- Building our solution centred around users’ problems gave us great insights into how city-dwellers view navigating cities.
- Users often have to choose between a pleasant journey (being outside, seeing beautiful things, doing exercise) and a safe and fast one which is often the metro service.
- Moving around a city is not only about getting to your destination but also about enjoying the ride: users prefer walking or cycling when they feel safe to do so.
- The choice of transportation method varies according to many factors: weather, footwear, luggage, alertness…
- People generally feel unsafe navigating cities, which were not built to take into account the modern way we travel.
- In big cities, people would like to see commuting as a way to exercise, get some fresh air, people-watching.
- The habits of transportation are always changing, and COVID has accelerated this process
Challenges
My biggest problem was to work on such a complex process in such little time. Though timeboxing, having 3 other people on the project and thoroughly working through the stages helped, adversely more the project took form, more it seemed complex.
The fact that we chose to work on a hypothetical solution instead of a more implementable solution gave us a lot of freedom to work out our creative muscle but also broke down some barriers that gave us maybe too much freedom. This made deciding on a particular pain point and solution particularly difficult.
Though lo-fi wireframes are where this project ended, in theory, however, the next steps would be to continue iterating the application from mid-fi all the way to a functioning prototype. After that, tests would be necessary to make sure the app is as optimised as possible. Repeat the process as much as needed and release. Though it would be necessary to build all the infrastructure so Hopcycle could run, which, in France, would probably take about 30 years and 2 strikes.
I hope you enjoyed this case study, I truly appreciate the time you spent reading it!
