6 Stages of Design Thinking Put into Practice

Ironhack’s Prework: Challenge1

6 Stages of Design Thinking

Understanding design thinking is a powerful tool to have when taking on user experience and interface challenges. This systematic approach to problem solving requires understanding and implementation of a few key aspects. While in the design thinking process, it is vital to be user focused and as innovative as possible. The diagram below shows the process as a kind of loop, in order to emphasize that design thinking should be a continuous improvement process and that through staying open-minded to changes, your product will become even more creative and cutting edge. I will looking into the app CityMapper, putting the different steps of the design thinking framework into practice.

CityMapper

CityMapper is an app that allows users to easily calculate a route from point A to B, suggesting the best transportation systems for that specific route. The app’s goal is to make commuting and traveling as simple as possible. The user can see various different traveling options, such as public transport, walking, taxi or bicycle, seeing the pretty exact approximate duration of the trip. The app will tell you which part of the metro is best to get on, and which exist is best to get off. If you’re the sporty kind, the app even allows you to see how many calories you’ll burn walking or riding your bicycle. What more would you want, right? Keep reading…

The Problem

While CityMapper is great for calculating the route and giving you various different options to choose from, there is one pain-point that I would like to tackle right now, right here. We live in a world where we can almost do anything in seconds by a swiping our finger across a screen. We want information now with the least effort possible, which is also true when it comes to buying our public transportation tickets. Who still has the time and patients to queue, then figure out a machine built last century, to then having to talk to an actual person to ask for assistance and ultimately run into the risk of needing actual cash, like real money. And all that for a small piece of paper. What a waste. Also, let’s be real, who really wants to touch one of those grimy metro station machines in corona times? Not me. When using an app like CityMapper, I not only want to know how best to get to the nail salon across town, but how much it’ll cost me! How else will I know whether the 78 calories I’ll burn walking are worth it? So, this proposes the challenge of adding a user-friendly and effective ticket-buying feature to the app CityMapper.

The Process

Coming back to design thinking discussed earlier, I will use this approach and outline the steps I have taken to come up with my addition feature, that will put us all out of our misery.

Research

In order to empathize with the users, I conducted interviews, finding out how people interact with public transport, traveling and commuting and dug a bit further to find out their personal pain-points and thoughts. The core set of interview questions were as follows:

What kind of transportation systems do you use on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis?

When traveling and/or commuting, how do you plan your journey?

How do you purchase your transportation tickets?

What bothers you the most about buying transportation tickets?

How would you improve the ticket-buying process?

From my findings I was able to define the problem, boiling down answers into three main pain-points:

• Hidden extra costs
• Low accessibility
• Confusing purchasing process

Brainstorm

Let’s ideate. From the interviews, I got a good understanding what common pain-points are amongst commuters and what they wish to see differently. Continuously referring to my main three points from the section above, I went into the brainstorming phase. The point of this stage is to get your creative juices flowing, meaning quantity over quality. Some thoughts and ideas that came up during this sessions were:

• pay for ticket before travel or pay as you go?
• possibility of no service on underground train and metro stations
• how best to adapt to different transportation kinds (eg. bus, metro, tram)
• how are multiple tickets for one journey organized?

After sketching various different possibilities, I refined the best solution, coming up with a prototype

Prototype

For this challenge I developed a low-fidelity prototype only, that embodies my findings from the previous sections. As a very international individual, currently based in Madrid, I thought about the London tube, German s-bahn and Madrid metro and main transportation systems, wanting something that would work in multiple countries. While London makes a pay-as-you-go options easy by tracking where the commuter exists the tube, tickets need to be bought prior in places like Madrid, in order to charge the correct price.

The new ticket flow starts when clicking the “GO” button (below shown as the Spanish version “IR”).

1. A modal pops up asking the user if he would like to buy a ticket before starting his journey.
2. When clicking the “YES” button, the modal changes asking the user if he wants to buy a single or return trip.
3. the user is lead to a screen showing the cheapest price option for her trip. She has the options to change number of passengers and see more details about these specific tickets. This is a total price and can be compiled from multiple different tickets if the user needs to change station or method of transport during her trip. The user can confirm to buy the cheapest price or see more prices.
4. If she clicks to see more details about the cheapest trip, the user will see the different tickets with the individual prices that compose the total price shown on the screen in the previous step. The user can confirm this price and pay if she wants.
5. If the user chooses to see more prices in step 3, she will see a list of various other prices. Clicking on details will bring the user to step 4 with the specific price they have selected.
6. If the user confirms a price, she will see a confirmation screen and can navigate to the wallet.
7. The wallet shows the active tickets, with a code to scan in order to use the method of transport. The user also has the option to send the ticket to her email or download prior to her trip in case she does not have service or wifi later.
8. The wallet option should be added to the menu of the app and easily accessed from anywhere.

Conclusion

Coming to an innovative, yet user-friendly and functional feature design requires research, review and creativity, which the design thinking process outlines. Empathizing with the audience, meaning actually listening to them and conducting proper research might bring out new ideas in the brainstorming phases. One phase goes hand-in-hand with the other and is as vital as the next.

Next steps in this challenge would include wire-framing and high-fidelity designs, implementing these designs, testing and most probably starting the design thinking process again in order to continuously learn and improve.