Quiet London Bike App 🚲

Case study no. 1 at General Assembly

What’s your daily challenge?

In my first week of the UX Design Immersive course at General Assembly, I worked with Jin to solve one of her main daily challenges. The goal was to create a lo-fi app prototype.

Just after a few minutes of conversation with Jin, we’ve identified her problem: she’d love to use her bike as a means of transport in London but finds the busy main roads risky and keeps getting lost whenever she takes the side roads.

From there, we’ve started digging deeper to discover the reasons why Jin wouldn’t use her bike in London. While using current apps available on the market, these were the three strongest pain points she encountered:
・Going on the main roads with buses.
・Pushing the bike on the pavement on side roads.
・GPS voice navigation that would not detect when she went off route.

Jin (left) “Are you kidding me? I got to push my bike on the pavement!? Those buses are a nightmare!”

We then looked at Jin’s main priorities:
・Simple & efficient way to go from point A to B.
・See the time and elevation of the proposed route.
・Automatically update route when streets become empty at night.

Feedback and Iteration

I mapped all the available information out and started creating wireframes for the app that would avoid all pain points and would incorporate the priorities. After the first feedback from Jin, I realised that the interface of some of the screens could be simplified even more by removing the map on the first screen and by condensing multiple route proposals one map on the results screen.

The team feedback resulted in the addition of options to show different types of cycling paths and having the voice navigation in one headphone only for safety reasons.

Prototype and usability testing

I was very happy to find that Jin was satisfied with the experience of using the prototype and didn’t have any further comments at that time.

Also, when testing the app with another user from GA, I got positive feedback on the experience and a suggestion that when generating all proposed routes, they should be as simple as possible as you could get lost even with a GPS.

Future features?

・Save a particular route.
・Keep count of the completed kilometres.

Personal observations

・It is important to keep returning to all the interview notes, mind maps, user flows at all stages of the project.
・Thorough preparation is needed before interviewing the user to be able to ask the right questions.