Ironhack’s Prework: Design thinking — Challenge 1

My first challenge, as a new student at the Iron Hack UX/UI Bootcamp, will be to tackle a frequent pain point related to public transport usage through the Design Thinking method.

Challenge background

The product object of this Challenge is “Citymapper”, a mobile application dedicated to web mapping and public transport, which integrates information from all means of urban transport, including public transport.

Although the current product of Citymapper already solves some of the main problems of urban mobility, there is one pain point for many users: the different number of public transport tickets the users have to purchase.

To solve said frequent pain point I will be using the “Design Thinking Process”, which goes as follows:

1. Emphatize

In this phase, the goal is to understand who you’re designing for. Therefore, in order to understand and define the problem, I interviewed 5 users of public transport in Spain, focusing on their experience with ticket purchases, and I have reached the following conclusions:

• Public transport needs innovation, especially in the ticket purchase and ticket validating process.
• Many tickets are needed for a single journey.
• Users don’t understand where to buy all of the different tickets.
• People are concerned about arriving late to their final destination due to the ticket buying process.

2. Define

What is the main problem? Based on the interview’s conclusions, the pain point is: Users don’t want to waste time and efforts in the purchase of different transport tickets to get to the final destination in their travels.

3. Ideate

To find the solution to the previous problem, I have used the Citymapper App to make a trip in which multiple tickets were needed. In doing so, I have realized that there is a key moment when the users could buy all tickets at once through a simple purchase process.

4. Prototype

In this way, I have used Figma to recreate the first 4 steps of the Citymapper App, establishing a route and adding a simple purchase process. Here, the user can buy all the tickets for the trip at once (or use a Travelpass if they have it) and validate them using NFC technology during the itinerary.

Tickets are saved in the “My tickets” button, and users can validate them during their journey.

Things I learned

During this first challenge I have learned the importance of user research to understand the problem and to find a possible solution for the user’s pain points.