Ironhack’s Prework:HenrietteHumprecht_Challenge1.
UX & ticket booking
In this article I’d like to guide you through my process of a mockup for Ironhack’s UX/UI Design Course pre-work. My task was to create a feature for UrbanGo / CityMapper, which allows easy on-the-fly booking of public transportation tickets when traveling abroad.
Citymapper is an app for route comparison. It shows a wide variety of options to get from A to B easy and fast. You get to choose the city you travelled to — works worldwide — next you can search for your destination using the address or the name of the sight, institution or place you want to go. The App browses databases from various transportation suppliers and allows you to filter specific options to be considered. Here comes the first tricky challenge: it can be anything from local busses/trains/metro, to taxi/uber, to car/bike/scooter sharing. This means, booking tickts via the app must enable the user to receive different kinds of tickets, depending on the option they choose.
Here’s the deal: you’re not able to book any tickets via the app. You would need to download the apps from each provider you’d like to use or buy your ticket on a ticket mashine or with a ticket vendor.
Finding the pain points
Next up, I needed to evaluate opinions of potential users of my feature. I figured, talking to people who regularely travel and might be on a budget at times would be the best start. I interviewed 5 people age 27–32, who are considered digital natives and frequent travellerts. The main pain points I gathered from the Interviews came out quite different than expected. Everyone mentioned that they always try to avoid downloading additional apps. Two out of five interviewees mentioned they prefer talking to actual people when buying a ticket, whereas the others mostly like to avoid that.
Main pain points were also the language barrier, the lack of wifi/mobile data in foreign countries. My interviewees were not willing to purchase mobile data on their phones and would rather avoid buying at the machine, as thex feel hindered by long queues, hygienic issues as well as not knowing the station they need to go in order to reach a specific place.
The Main goal for me was masking the ticket booking easy to use, universally comprehensible and always available (on and offline, if possible). I was trying to solve the problem, that multiple transport companies require downloading different apps which is time- and mobile data-consuming.
Prototyping
I set the goals to enable a pre-download of the regular transportation tickets and planned to introduce a pre-paid system to use the user’s existing amount offline. I chose a QR code that would be valid in any of the transportation options. For this, cooperations with the specific companies would be needed. After purchasing the ticket, it would minimize and show up in the bottom of the app during the time of it’s validity. It could be opened up any time to full screen whenever needed. You could also store multiple tickets at the same time, if they’re all valid, e.g. train ticket, taxi voucher, and a QR code for your bike ride.
Insights
What did I learn during the process? For me it was difficult to not start and re-think the whole application but rather focus on only the feature I was supposed to create. Apart from that, I found it difficult to assume that the feature would need to be integrated into other applications as well, to make sure that e.g. the reservation for a bike would be registered in the providers system. In summary, I am happy with the prepaid option and the QR Code ticket solution I came up with and looking forward to the feedback.
