Design Thinking Exercise

Urban Go is a public transit and mapping start up. Using their app the customer finds the cheapest and shortest way from A to B. This often results in changing the means of transport several times during one trip.

Create a feature for this app that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transport tickets by different channels by using the Design Thinking process.

What problem am I solving?
Urban Go provides the best and cheapest way from A to B for their customers but this often includes having to purchase different tickets from different providers for one trip. The customers often have problems finding the right tickets because of the different channels.

Who is my audience?

Who is the client’s competition?

What’s the tone/feeling?

Bringing clarity into the chaos. Making traveling easy by taking the exhausting part out of it

The design thinking process starts with getting a closer view at your customer. This works best when you are actually talking to them. For this exercise I interviewed five people (age between 25 – 37) to hear about their experiences using public transport. Sitting down with them, hearing them out, feeling their pain points was really interesting.

Beforehand I prepared some questions to guide them through the interview:

From here on I was digging deeper into the personal experiences

While asking these questions I was taking into account that nobody remembers every detail of their trips. What people do remember are stunning experiences or pain points. So the things they kept in mind are certainly worth hearing and perfect for my evaluation of the main problems.

After I’ve learned a lot about the users pain points I tried to focus on the main problems I wanted to solve during this exercise:

In this phase of the Design Thinking process I brainstormed possible solutions to the users problems and needs.

Additional to the already existing app I decided to add:

This exercise requires to sketch a prototype.

Even though you think you already know about all the needs of the users you can be really surprised about the outcome of the interviews.

It helped me a lot to put all my thoughts on paper throughout the process. This way I can sort the chaos in my thoughts.

It is hard to focus on just one problem after hearing about so many pain points.

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