Ironhack — Challenge 1: Design Thinking

Ironhack’s Prework: Janine Wieting_Challenge1

Citymapper

Citymapper is a free public transit and mapping app. The main function of this app is to offer to the consumer the best solution when it comes to urban mobility. It does so, by showing the quickest and cheapest public transport routes to their users. It integrates data for all urban modes of transport, including walking, cycling and driving, in addition to public transport.

Although the current product of Citymapper already solves some of the main problems of urban mobility, there is one pain point for many users:

The different amount of public transport tickets the users have to purchase. Unfortunately things like pricing or purchasing the correct ticket can become a real pain when you are abroad.

Step One: Empathize

To get a better point of view, I interviewed 5 people and asked them about many aspects of traveling.

Step Two: Define

Gather findings and define a problem statement, focusing on the user’s viewpoint. Detect the main problem that you want to solve.

After interviewing people about their travel habits and experiences, there are the following main findings:

• Most people travel for holiday, visiting family or business trips
• They mostly use Google Maps to navigate through a city, but also apple maps, waze or local apps (e.g. DB Navigator)
• Purchasing a ticket is done either on the app itself (e.g. DB Navigator) or the vending machine
• The biggest issue for people who buy tickets on the app is to not have signal or the payment opportunities (e.g. mostly accepted payment opportunity is credit card or PayPal — no giro card)
• Users would love to save recent tickets in a wallet in order to have them all at one place.

The main and most important finding is the following: Consumers wish for an app, which combines all transportation opportunities — such as bus, subway, bike, cap) and also the purchase of the tickets.

As Citymapper is already combining a lot of public transit opportunities, it should also:

- include other travel opportunities such as taxi, scooter and so on

- offer tickets in the app

Step Three: Finding a solution

Use brainstorming techniques to generate a lot of ideas to solve the problem.

Step Four: Prototype

Pick one of those three top solutions and develop it in a few hand-sketched screens

Now we focus on one main issue which is the missing opportunity to buy a ticket, which allows the consumer to use different public transport offers — not only one. Therefore we assume, that the tickets in the sketched prototype allows the users to use all means of transport shown in the app.

Result

All together, I have learned a lot during this exercise. I have learned, that asking yourself a lot of questions before starting interviews, makes the quality of the interview answers much more valuable and the flow of the conversation much nicer. The variety of travel habits and people’s issues with navigation apps is interesting, but at the same time it is hard to solve all problems in one step. I have focused on the most often mentioned problem, which is to not only find the best way to move from A to B in a new city, but also to buy tickets for this travel — all in one app. To solve this problem, i have sketched the process of finding a way to go from A to B in the Citymapper app and in a second step, to purchase the needed tickets for that particular travel. In the end i have given the user also different payment methods.