Easy Ticket Purchasing in the Citymapper Transport App

Introduction

This story summarizes the findings and results from my first Ironhack design thinking challenge. I was asked to create a new feature for Citymapper; an app that helps their users choose the right transport options between any two locations in a city.

Citymapper positions itself as the ultimate transport app. Built for the real world of commuters and their daily needs. The app is live in 50+ cities worldwide. It integrates data form all urban modes of transport, including walking, cycling and driving, in addition to public transport.

Citymapper’s mission is “Making Cities Useable”

There are, however, several issues when using multiple public transport channels. 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.).

The challenge (as set by Ironhack) is to create a feature for Citymapper that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels.

Citymapper has come up with a solution to this problem by introducing a pass (one subscription for all transport). However, a pass still has its limits. For example, it won’t support one time users of the app or the use of tickets scanners. Therefore, I will try to come up with a fully mobile solution that will make a pass obsolete.

Emphasize

In order to get a better understanding of the design challenge at hand, I asked myself four questions.

What problem are you trying to solve?
Having to (manually) buy multiple (paper) tickets when traveling from A to B using public transport.

Who is your audience?
Contrary to Citymapper’s target audience (daily commuters), I will focus on travelers that will use the app for planning trips in a city outside the Netherlands. Dutch commuters or any other form of periodical travelers in the Netherlands are likely to use the local ticket solution OV chipkaart.

Who are your client’s competitors?
Competitors from Citymapper are other (local) travel applications such as the 9292 app in the Netherlands. But perhaps the biggest competitor is Google Maps that has its own integrated travel planner.

What’s the tone/feeling?
Citymapper feels like an intuitive app. It’s designed to be very user friendly and easy to use. It should appeal to a large group of people as it uses an inclusive design.

After contemplating the case I came up with four main interview questions that would help get a better understanding of the user’s frustrations and needs.

When traveling in a city abroad:

1. What do you like or dislike about using public transport?
2. What apps do you use to help you plan trips?
3. How do you perceive buying tickets for public transport?
4. What features should an app have that helps you plan trips and buy tickets?

Define

The interviews were very insightful. Here’s a summary of the most common remarks:

When abroad the interviewees like to use the public transport. It makes them feel like a local and it shows some of the culture of a city. Prerequisites are that it should be easy to use and that there should be a big enough price difference with alternatives such as Uber.

Dislikes about using public transport in a foreign city are: long lines (waiting time), complicated routes/maps, language issues, and finally complicated ticket purchasing systems. The above can cause stress and when it will get too much the interviewees will switch to alternative modes of transport.

The respondents are definitely open to using apps that help them navigate through foreign city’s public transportation. All of the respondents already use Google Maps, but Maps doesn’t have a ticket option nor does it offer good offline options.

The interviewees are excited about an app that allows you to buy tickets for public transport. They believe that this could make things much easier. Some issues did cause up about the payment methods. Some respondents preferred single payments (especially for long distance traveling) and others preferred working with a balance (for flexibility and ease).

The respondents were very clear about one thing. The app should be super easy to use. Don’t offer too many options as you’ll be outside and moving around.

Based on these findings I have distilled a main problem that I want to solve in my new design.

Creating a feature for Citymapper that allows its users to use public transport without worrying about how and where to get tickets. Thus, allowing them to better enjoy the culture and experience of traveling with public transport in a foreign city.

Ideate

I used brainstorming and mind mapping techniques to generate three possible solutions to the main problem (see picture below).

Option 1: A physical card payment system

Option 2: Pay per route (integrated with route planner)

Option 3: A ready to use scanner with wallet/credit (separate from route planner)

Because Citymapper already has a physical card system I decided to focus on the ready to use scanner with wallet system. The pay per route system would be impractical to use as you would have to create a route before being able to pay. This takes away much of the needed flexibility of traveling with public transport.

Prototype

In order to get a better feeling of the chosen solution I’ve decided to sketch a prototype (see picture below). This allows me to quickly assess the solution and share it with users and other stakeholders.

Two assumptions for the design:

1. the city must use mobile phone payment technology;
2. The city uses a ‘scan in’ ‘scan out’ system to use their public transport (like most big cities).

Important design features:

The home screen should have an easy to reach pay/scan button. When you’re on the run you can’t afford to lose any time looking for the pay/scan button.

I did not connect the payment to the route planner, so you don’t need to first select a route. This saves time when on the run.

Once you’ve agreed to an autofill payment option the pay/scan button is operational.

The scanner works by pressing ‘Pay/scan’ for a couple of seconds near the ticket scanner. You need to do this when entering and exiting the public transport of choose. Note; this system could also work with QR codes at each station but that’s not the industry standard.

By pressing ‘Go’ you can always return to your route.

Key learnings

It is tempting to go the solution straight away and skip the emphasize and ideate phase. However, going through all the steps in the design thinking process requires less work than one might think and there are many benefits.

Without a proper emphasize phase you might miss the main issue and design the wrong thing. And without the proper ideation you might just pick the first idea that comes to mind and that’s hardly ever the best one.