Ironhack’s Prework : Mathilde Gau-Challenge 1

For this UX Challenge of the Ironhack’s Prework, I’ve worked on a new feature for the Citymapper app, The Ultimate Transport app.

Citymapper is a journey planner app for public transports, but also taxis, bikes, or scooters. It started in London, and was founded by Amat Yusuf, a former Google employee, in 2011, today it covers more than 50 cities in the world.

Citymapper uses the power of open data to make transport sustainable and hassle-free. The app has won many awards, they are really user-centric, and they have a fun tone of voice, which also helps them to stand out from other apps.

But as we all know, there are always ways for improvement !

I interviewed 5 users to understand how they use public transports, in order to find ideas to improve the app.

I focused my interviews on people who often went to cities they don’t know, because that’s when you are most likely to have the most pain points in your experience : you don’t know which journey you have to take, which tickets to buy, etc.

For the users I interviewed, the pain points that emerged when they are using public transports are :

• The lack of precision of the available information : for example they often struggle to find easily the entrance of the subway station or the bus stop.
• Too many changes or too much time between connections.
• They sometimes don’t know if they will have time to buy the tickets before the departure, it causes a lot of stress.
• There is often a line of people on the tickets terminal, so they lose time.
• Finding the ticket terminal is frustrating : they can feel tired, frustrated, and angry.
• It is not always possible to pay with the payment method that you want.

I often pray before going on the bus that they will take my credit card because I never have change.

• When there is a system of card that can be credited they either put too much or not enough money on the card, which is frustrating.

It is impossible to estimate the number of journeys I will have to take, I don’t know the city and it depends on so many things, the weather, if I will be tired, etc.

• They feel frustrated when they have to buy several tickets for just one journey.

As we can see, a lot of pain points come from the experience of buying tickets. So this will be really interesting for Citymapper to use this for their next feature evolution.

The pain point I want to resolve is to help the users buying their tickets quickly and easily, without confusion and stress.

In order to solve this problem, I thought about different solutions : for example being able to pay for the journey directly on the app beforehand or having a Citymapper pass that you can credit.
But the most seamless solution would be to have a Citymapper pass on your phone directly related to your credit card, that you tap contactless for each journey, and this way you only have to pay once which is a great time-saving feature !

The pass will be directly integrated within the app, but it could also be on google pay or apple pay.

Here is the wireframe I selected to show you this new feature.

With this evolution in the feature of the app, Citymapper would strengthen his position by giving the user a full experience and journey for traveling in public transports with the app.

My key learnings…

This challenge gave me a rather complete overview of all the steps that have to be taken to initiate a user-centric evolution.
I really appreciated conducting the interviews ! Trying to understand the answers and dig in the feeling of the users was really rich. The most valuable thing I learned during this interview was to let silences happen, not something I am usually good at, but those were the times when I had the most interesting answers !

I also didn’t expect to find so many other inputs by doing my interviews, that were not related with the topic and could be areas of improvement for Citymapper and maybe future evolutions as well.

Thanks a lot for reading me, I would love your comments on my work :) .

Mathilde