The importance of user interviews

What is the challenge

UrbanGo is a public transit and mapping startup based in Silicon Valley. Their goal is to solve the problems of urban mobility by offering the quickest and cheapest public and private transport routes to their users but there is one pain point for many users: the different amount of public transport tickets the users have to purchase.

Public transport tickets come in paper or plastic cards. Very often buying different public transport tickets is necessary to go from point A to B. And the process of buying these tickets can be very annoying (queues, vending machines that don’t work, etc.).

Finally, things like pricing or purchasing the correct ticket can become a real pain when you are abroad.

So basically, what problem are we solving?

Time management & cost, specially for people who are abroad and therefore either don’t know the city so well, maybe don’t speak the language either, and have trouble identifying official procedures or purchasing tickets. On top of it, generally when you are visiting somewhere, you have a precise budget, and therefore can’t spend too much on your traveling around and rather spending it on the actual things & places you are visiting.

What is the task?

To create a feature for this app that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.

My user / persona

Meet Sam. He is 31 years old from Birmingham and works in Finance. He is a good traveller, and has visited most of South American Countries, but unfortunately not european ones. This year he has decided to do so, and would like to plan his next trip to Rome with a little bit of advance. He stays in the city center, but wants to move around the city a lot and wonders which are the best mobility options available that will allow him to move around with the minimum cost and as fastest as possible. He only has 3 days and doesn’t want to miss a thing!

Research: Interviews

I conducted 5 interviews to five users (3 male and 2 female) of the same age range as Sam, all used to traveling and asked them about their experiences of mobility while doing so, their preferred type of transport and why, how the usually buy tickets (vending machine or ticket offices)

Conclusions I dram from this initial investigation were the following:

1. One of the preferred used options to check how to travel around is through blogs or articles that other previous “travelers” have written. This is because its a good way to check in your own language, advices of people you identify with.
2. Asking for information in the city itself sometimes feels intimidating: as you don’t know if what they are telling you is safe, or if they are trying to overcharge you and sometimes there is a language issue. Therefore generally machines represent a much better option, even though sometimes they become a time issue.
3. Google maps seems to be preferred option but only in countries where you have roaming. If not, access to internet becomes a problem and therefore alternatives that have an offline mode are better (like maps.me). The same happens when traveling in the underground: you don’t always have connectivity which certain times means getting lost.
4. The problem on the other hand with offline alternatives, seems to be that they don’t give real time information like a construction work in a line, an alternative route a bus might be taking due to an accident, or a particularly significant delay.
5. Citymapper for the interviewees that know it is too complicated: there is too much information on display, which can be useful when you are familiar with a city, but no when you are a first timer. Generally users just want to be told what is the quickest and simplest way of traveling from point A to point B.
6. Freedom of choice and security seem to be two very important attributes while traveling. All interviewees mention how much they like being able to improvise and change their plans while visiting a city, and therefore the mobility platform they check needs to be able to adapt to that, and also mention that they want the guarantee it’s safe.
7. A general problem in mobility within a city seems to come with the lack of instructions after purchasing the ticket itself: where and how to validate, which entrance or exit to take etc…

Prototyping

How to solve the problems after the investigation:

By creating a function in city mapper app by which you can plan a trip ahead by saving some destinations and routes, and you can then see in an offline mode.

In this function, Sam will be able with his menu on the right to enter where he will be staying in the city he is visiting, and use it as a preferred destination to go to or from; drag and pinpoint places he wants to visit on the map, check best routes from the airport to the city center, and see all recommendations on the map for sightseeing and save his favourites.

When selecting traveling from a point A to a point B, he will be able to sort his route by speed, cost, or most voted by users, and after completing each route, the app will allow him to rate it (0 to 5 stars) and save it. Every time he selects to sort by price/speed/most voted, the app will automatically highlight below if that route is by car, walking, public transport, or taxi (uber etc).

Also when selecting a route he will see three indicators, (bars) of the speed of the journey, price and safety, as well as being able to check opinions of other users in regards of how to validate a ticket or other problems they may have encountered.

City mapper will also include a forum for users to interact with each other and share opinions or questions they may have, in order to create a community of travelers.

Key learnings

1. Before the interviews I hadn’t thought about the problematic connectivity represents when traveling abroad, and how important the idea of an offline mode was as an option.
2. Even though speed and price were initially issues, when considering a user using City Mapper to navigate a foreign city, safety came up as an important quality, together with the idea of trusting more users.
3. Sketching changes everything, because you realize the importance of representing ideas in a simple visual way, that a user can understand without overloading them with information.