CLIENT: PUBLIC Bikes
ROLE: UX Designer
DURATION: 2 week group project
TOOLS: Sketchbook, Stickynotes, Sketch3, InVision
METHODS: Competitive & Comparative Analysis, Gamestorming, Design Studio, Survey, Contextual Inquiry Paper Prototype, Usability Testing, Collaborative & Agile Design
DELIVERABLES: Affinity Diagram, Sitemap, Journey Map, Hi-Fidelity desktop Wireframes and Interactive Prototype
Brief
PUBLIC is a San Francisco based bicycle and gear company. They design and sell urban bikes, along with accessories to make riding more enjoyable, practical, and chic. PUBLIC has been watching the electric bike (e-bike) market explode all around Europe and Asia, so they teamed up with BionX to create stylish modern e-bikes. Unfortunately people are not rushing to buy them, we are here to investigate and hope to turn the situation around.
Challenges
Our goal is to introduce E-bikes and educate people on how E-bikes work. We will exhibit the store vision that help people get around more intelligently and more artfully. Through serious of UX methodologies, we will also re-design PUBLIC's digital channels for a chance to reach out to larger demographics.
HYPOTHESIS
After thoroughly evaluated PUBLIC website and visiting competitor's websites. We discussed some pros and cons from the site and revealed some big issues below:
Text heavy: The site is full of description and words that make people hard to access the important information and learn about what an E-bike is. It should be simple and easy to read so people can easily find what they are looking for. Quick and easy access is essential for a good e-commerce site.
Difficult to navigate: There are too many icons and mix colors making the website confuse to read.
Test Ride: E-bike has been considered to be a luxury item, therefore, test ride is very important for people to experience and discover the need to have one.
Design Process
RESEARCH
This is a team project as we go through various of UX design method collaboratively. Gathered and analysis qualitative data to come up with various low fidelity designs. We test, iterate and repeat the process until we get a perfect user experience design.
Empathy Map Speed Boat Activity
Working collaboratively and synthesize pains and gains from consumer's side. This activity allow us to summarize business and customer's priorities and needs.
Competitive and comparative analysis
Public has a lot of great features and rich content on its site but we discovered that the most valuable information on their site is nearly impossible to access.
Commuters in our survey were confused about what an e-bike is:
“Do they generate electricity when you pedal?”
We started the ideation process and start building low fidelity wireframes based on three personas we created from interviews, contextual inquiry, and gamestorming.
Analysis
After gathering our data from surveys, interviews and observations from contextual inquiry, we synthesized our data and reveal a higher level insights:
- People aren’t aware of how much they spend on commuting
- Budget and price are the main factors that drive purchase decisions.
- Commuters in our survey were confused about ebikes.
- It’s very important for customers to test ride and ensure they get a bike that is accurately sized for them
Design studio, contextual inquiry, sketching, paper prototyping.
After more than a week of research, testing various UX design methods such as Design Studio, Rapid prototype, Contextual inquiry and more. We refined our design after usability testing, iteration and repeat then we came up with the following recommendations:
Financing options
Test Ride
Benefit Calculator
Recommendations from family and friends (Social sharing)
Results
Clean, Simple and Minimalist Design of PUBLIC website (that match the in-store experience).
Hi-fidelity wireframes after rounds of iteration and usability test.
What's Next?
I would like to focus the direction in service design for PUBLIC bike, so I created a service blueprint for PUBLIC bike store so we can find opportunities to come in that would promote the interaction between the bike store and its customers. The goal is not only to educate the customer about what an e-bike is but also provide quality customer service and turn them into a royal customer.