Ironhack use case: Validating your tickets with your phone: the New Frontier in public transportations

How many times have you left your public transportation pass at home? vs. how many times have you left your phone at home?

Smartphones have brought about a revolution in our everyday life. From the way we search and consume information, to the way we now do things we would usually do on our desktop computers, laptops, or even paper notebooks.

Public transportations or the way we travel is no exception. How many apps do you presently have on your smartphone that are solely dedicated to public transportations? Go on, have a look. I have 2 of them for public transportations in Paris, and one for traveling on trains. I even used to have a 4th one because of where I used to work in the Parisian suburb.

Public transportation companies are very slowly getting into the business of providing e-tickets in some countries or regions. They sometimes do it with the help of a third-party app that their users must install to access new services.

How can we seamlessly include and facilitate the purchase and use of tickets in our public transportation apps?

Let’s use Design Thinking to go about this and allow me to sketch a proposal.

Note: I will not discuss the Testing phase in this article.

Recap of the Design Task

Create a feature for a fictitious app that solves the pain of having to purchase different public transportation tickets by different channels.

For whom? People using transportations in their city or when traveling abroad.

Process Overview

Diagram of the Design Thinking process I used. The Test phase is not included. — Details of the process I went through.

It’s all About Empathy

My first Design Thinking phase included:

a 5WH analysis of the design task,
online research to see how a smartphone could be used, technically speaking,
rounds of user interviews over Zoom,
the continuous improvement of my work methodology.

The 5W1H method

What’s better than asking yourself questions to have a good and thorough look at the design problem at hand? It’s quick, easy and it helps you list your assumptions, what you know and what you want to investigate during research. Plus, it takes me back to high school in writing class.

What? The fictitious app already provides itinerary and travel time services for public transportations. Let’s upgrade it.
Who? People using public transportations. They already have public transportation apps installed on their phones and their credit card’s details are in there.
When and Where? They might use the app at home to research the best ticket/pass plan to buy when traveling abroad, they can do it to change plans in their city. They can use it on the spot at the station, when getting on the bus or tramway, either to search something, buy something or just validate their tickets. They can also use it when their ride or purchase is over.
How? Well at this stage, I don’t know but I have the intuition that thinking about how they use the app before, during, and after using the smartphone is a good way to go about designing the most seamless app possible.
Why? Facilitation. Apps use storage on our phones. Why having 10 apps when you can just one? Of course, it must be well designed. It must help people chose the ticket/pass plan according to their needs, and it must also encourage them to use public transportations for environmental purposes.

Online research

If we want to include the purchase and validation of tickets in our users’ phones, we need to know how users can do transactions on their smartphones.

A quick Google search made me learn about NFC and QR codes. Both technologies can be linked to a credit card, can be used on smartphones with apps and in the case of NFC, users must activate this technology in order to use it.

It sounds good, but which one is better? Let’s see how real people go about using public transportations.

User Interviews

I did 2 rounds of interviews with 5 participants over 2 days. All from the comfort and safety of my home as Covid-19 still has me shelter in place.

I prepared my setting:

I chose to use Zoom to schedule, conduct, and record the interviews.
I decided to take notes on paper during the interviews.
I prepared a questionnaire on a sheet of paper with 10 questions, prompts for chase up questions, and guidelines on how to welcome and explain things to my participants.

How to better my user interviews?

The 1st round of interviews was a good way to test out this setting and see what I could improve.

I switched from my questionnaire on paper to a questionnaire directly on my computer. It was more convenient to maintain eye contact with the participants and I did not have to look back and forth between 2 sheets of paper (my notes and my questionnaire). I also found it easier to keep track of which question to ask next using the questionnaire on my computer.
I created a PPT deck with my introduction and instructions to the participants. I also included the questionnaire, but I did not show it to the participants. I would only share my screen when I wanted my participants to read the instructions and messages I had for them. It was more engaging for them. I could see them reacting as they would read or see the slides. I actually included an icebreaker in the deck, in the form of a picture to let them know that I would ask them the question “Why” a lot.

Screen captures of the PPT deck used for the 2nd round of interview. It includes a picture of me as a kid with a callout read — This the deck I used. And yes, this is baby me. Circa 1990 doing Guerilla tests in the park.

I improved my note-taking on paper. Reflecting back, I could have done it on my computer as well, but I really wanted to try out on paper. By numbering the questions, I could indicate the ID of the questions in my paper notes. I used arrows and the letter F to indicate Follow up question whenever I would ask one. I also used 2 different color pens: a blue pen to take notes, a red pen to draw happy smileys, and sad faces to highlight the good and the bad of the user experience of my participants. I would also circle what I found interesting or things other participants had mentioned as well… Next time, I will try to create empathy maps and user journey templates in Miro for note-taking.

Shall we further Define the problem now? Yes, we shall.

Let’s See About the Define Phase

To continue my Design Thinking project:

I made an empathy map,
I created a user persona,
I further defined my problem,
And I eventually tried to find ideas to solve the problem.

Let’s see the results of the interviews

Results displayed in an empathy map. — Empathy Map created after the interviews.

Here’s the persona I came up with

Results displayed in a persona. — Persona used to solve the problem.

Note: I didn’t give a real-person name to my persona nor use a picture to avoid being influenced by any cultural bias that would be associated with them.

Further definition of the problem

How can we leverage the use of smartphones to offer a simple ticket plan that people can use offline?

Insights and Ideation

Based on the results, I decided:

QR Codes would be a better option than NFC. QR Codes tickets can be printed and can work offline too. They can be associated to a credit card. This would allow users to have both a printed version of their ticket and use their smartphone as well.
The ticket purchase would be simplified with 2 options: a Monthly or Weekly Pass and a Pay-as-you-go Pass. The Pay-as-you-go Pass would let you charge the Pass with money and you would use your ticket credit balance when validating your ride. Both would cover all types of public transportations. It alleviates the burden of searching and understanding all the intricacies of public transportation services, especially when traveling. It would give enough flexibility to users depending on how long they intend to use public transportations.
To facilitate the use of the ticket feature to validate the Pass, the app would let the user add a shortcut on their mobile to directly open the app on the Pass screen or a PDF version of the Pass with the QR Code. It would help speed things up for users at the station or in public transportations.
Notifications would inform users of the validation of their Pass and give them the status of their ticket credit balance. It would notably be of great help when using the Pay-as-you-go Pass to check the ticket credit balance you have left and see when you have to recharge your pass.

Now let’s do some sketches.