Improving city mobility with Design thinking — Case study

How might we organize the variety of people navigating the streets to provide a more efficient and cleaner city?

The topic bringing us here today is related to the city mobility, evolving more and more. Moving around the city has witnessed transformation over the past years. Today we see a huge variety of alternatives emerging in the transportation sector. Meaning that the variety of people and devices navigating the streets is also growing.
I want to know how we might organize the variety of people moving around the streets to provide a more efficient and cleaner city ?

This is where Hopcycle comes in, it is a hypothetical alternative transport solution and companion app that we imagined.

Empathize with our users

The first step of the design thinking process that we used to answer this question was to Empathize with our users.

First, we conducted research, that resulted in really helpful insights to learn more about this problem and all the implications and facettes it could have.

The key learnings of secondary research (research from different sources) were :

• Safety : there is a real problem of safety in the cities, whereas it is regarding the road fatalities or the place of women
• Sustainability : ecological stakes are at the core of the city mobility issues
• Evolutions : the constant evolutions in an area where infrastructures are a key element is challenging. And recently with COVID-19, people have changed their habits

Then, we conducted primary research and interviewed 4 users to learn more about their habits and problems regarding city mobility.

• Tatiana, 29 years old, Store Manager in a fashion company.
• Delphine, 28 years old, e-commerce manager in a beauty company.
• Sabri, 32 years old, working in freelance.
• Marie-Lou, 25 years old, looking for a job in UX Design.

Before doing the interview we created an interview guide. The goal of this guide is to harmonize the questions we’ll ask and to follow a logical process. We started by asking more general questions before moving on to specifics. Of course, it is more than okay to ask additional questions when you want to dig in on a topic, or even to skip some questions that were written.

Here are the key insights we got from interviewing the different users:

• Infrastructure: users often expressed their frustrations with the transport infrastructure, often noting that cohabitation between the different methods of transport was very complicated. Because of that, cycling especially is very dangerous.

“Paris is not a cyclable city, the infrastructure doesn’t make sense.”

• User’s preferences: users mentioned that they chose their means of transport according to their motivation, the weather, if they wore heels, have luggage, etc.

“I choose my mean of transport according to my motivation”

• Safety: this problem has 2 sides, it concerns the safety of navigating the streets as a woman, or the safety regarding other vehicles. This feeling can translate into using Uber more than public transport to go home safely at night, or choosing to stop riding a bike.

“When I go cycling, I am always afraid of accident. I feel so endangered on a bike!”

• Open air: finally, many users shared that they prefer navigating cities in the fresh air. From home to the office, many said 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.

“Going around the city on a bus is like a show”

Define the area we want to focus on

Now we have empathized with our users and really dig in the insights we got from the research, let’s move on to the Define part of this process.

In order to use these insights and address correctly the needs and goals of our users we built Camille’s persona, The active careerist city lover.

A user persona is a representation of your user. It is based on the research done by the UX Designer, and building empathy with the users is a key to success for an effective user persona.

Getting to know Camille better, her goals, needs and her pain points, really helped us to convey her feelings and thinking throughout her journey.

The user persona was useful throughout the whole design process, because we were able to use it to take decisions regarding what Camille would need and what would help her best.

The user persona was also an important step that enabled us to build a user journey map. Thanks to the insights from our users, we built a journey map of one day during Camille’s life. The journey focuses on the commute to go to work and back from work.

User journey map is an excellent tool because it visualizes how a user interacts with a product and allows designers to see a product or service from a user’s point of view. This gives a more user-centric approach to product or service design, which ultimately leads to better user experience.

We wrote all the touchpoints that Camille had in her day with our product, which is here city mobility. This was based on the primary research. For every step of the user journey map, we related the action to a feeling or a thought that Camille had. And the most important is that we analyzed if it was a positive or negative emotions, in order to end up with a visual representation of the evolution of her emotional state through the day.

The user journey map helped us identify a design opportunity related to an important pain point in Camille’s journey. This design opportunity is the fact that Camille doesn’t feel safe when she rides a bike as she was almost hit by a car.

Leading us to the last part of the Define phase, our problem statement : 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 travelers due to city infrastructure making cohabitation between man-powered and motor-powered transport difficult.

Ideate, the process to find innovative ideas

We now move on to our Ideate phase. The goal of this phase is to ideate as many ideas as possible. To facilitate this process we used the crazy 8 method and came up with the idea of the train bike.

As you remember, Camille is really concerned about safety but also wants to make out of her commute : she wants to enjoy the fresh air, being outside, connect with people and do exercise.

Image source

Hopcycle, our solution, is a combination train and bicycle. It consists in a giant bicycle circuit all around the city that you can hop on and hop off. Every user cycles, powering the bicycle but as it is on a track, they do not have to feel worried about being focused on other vehicles or pedestrians.

The infrastructure is build on tracks, so there is no worry at all about having cars around. There is also a weather protection (especially useful when it is raining) and a fiberglass protection, in case of any potential collision.

It enables users to make the most of their commute : they can enjoy the surroundings and scenery, or do some last minute meeting preparation or administrative paperwork, daydream during the ride, etc. Our solution aims at being the most safe, social and enjoyable way to get from point A to point B.

We designed clear, lo-fi wireframes to present you a feature of the Hopcycle app, which will enable Camille to book a seat on the bike.

• Camille 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 .
• As Camille is a safety driven person, she also wants to book a helmet, which she can do in only 2 clicks.
• Thanks to the pre-determined method of payment, she’s only one click-away from her ride on the Hopcycle !

Key learnings

Building our solution centered around users problematics gave us great insights, here are the key learnings.

• 01. Users often have to choose between a pleasant journey (being outside, seeing beautiful things, doing exercise) and a safe and fast one which is subway
• 02. Moving around in the city, is not only about going to destination but also enjoying the ride : users prefer walking or cycling when they feel safe
• 03. The choice of transportation method varies according to many factors : the weather, wearing heels, carrying luggage, whether you are tired or not, etc.

• 04. People generally feel unsafe navigating cities, which were not built to take into account the modern way we travel
• 05. In big cities like Paris, people would like to see commuting as a way to exercise, getting some fresh air, observing people. This is really different in real life (mean travellers were often quoted)
• 06. The habits of transportation are always changing, and COVID has accelerated this process

This project was a collaborative project as we were 4 UX Designers working together on it ! We were working remotely and co-located. We varied between sessions of individual work and then sessions of brainstorming where we put in common our ideas.

We didn’t know each other and came from different backgrounds. The differences in our experiences were really rich because we had our strengths on this project, but it was also challenging because we didn’t have the same priorities and had to harmonize in a really short period of time, as the project lasted only 10 days !

We had a great use of tools such as Mural and Figma. With these tools we were able to brainstorm really easily, whereas it is on the insights or the graphical chart we wanted to use for our project.

I really loved working as a team on this project, and even it lasted only 10 days I learned a lot. As it is said in design thinking, “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution”. Working on the project I really felt this, I felt concerned and implicated in the problem we have identified, and it was a great feeling.

I’ll appreciate your questions or feedbacks on this project, thanks for reading !

Mathilde