Ironhack’s Prework: Lalita Loban-Challenge 1
Our first design challenge in our pre-course work for Ironhack's Ux/Ui bootcamp asked us to redesign a travel app (Citymapper) to allow for a streamlined approach to travel- namely cutting out the time and stress of needing to purchase multiple tickets for the same trip. Here I outline my experience.
First, a little background on our app. Citymapper is an award-winning website and application designed to streamline public transportion. According to wikipedia, “it integrates data for all urban modes of transport, including walking, cycling, and driving in addition to public transport.” It was founded in London in 2011 and has grown to be capable of utilization in 58 cities and Metropolitan areas.
Once I had established the parameters of the issue at hand, I created a list of interview questions to understand people’s experience with travel apps, specifically abroad, and their frustrations and successes. A few sample questions were:
- How often do you use travel apps?
2. What modes of transportation have you used while traveling abroad?
3. Can you detail what you like about the apps you use daily? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?
4. Can you tell me what your biggest frustrations are with your worst experience with a travel app? What would you fix?
After conducting my interviews I found that I had a mixed bag of people who never used travel apps abroad and users who used an app daily. Although my users were varied we did come to a common issue- they wanted to get their tickets as quickly and efficiently as possible. Specifically while traveling abroad, the user’s biggest gripe was not understanding how tickets work and the cost of said tickets. They found it specifically hard when in a country where a different language is spoken.
As I now had my problem to solve, I began brainstorming various scenarios to streamline the process of purchasing tickets. I needed to take out the frustration of guessing, to create an option where the app calculated fares for the users from location to destination and did it with one universal ticket. I decided the best way to do this would be to include a QR code into the app that could be read by all ticket machines, drivers, conductors etc. with a timer function built in so that once the trip was done the code would expire.
I created a prototype of my design which added a QR function and lock screen that would show a user’s activated ticket with a toggle to a map that showed real time travel:
Throughout this process I learned that navigating travel, especially abroad, can be daunting and intimidating for many. I was surprised to learn so many of the people I interviewed had similar pain points that lead me to come to a rather simple solution. I realized once I started brainstorming it helped to go back to the issue at hand to come up with a simple, streamlined solution that I hope will be easy to navigate for all.
