I started the Ironhack Bootcamp in UI/UX in November 2022. This bootcamp is divided in different projects, and the first one was named “Wicked Problems”. The problem here was how to deliver a solution to an increasing mobility problem that big cities are experiencing, and how we could organize the variety of people navigating the streets, providing a more efficient and cleaner city.
Wicked problems — “…a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.”
Each group was given a topic in society’s problems that are really hard to solve (Food Sustainability, Immigration…). Our given topic was “City Mobility”.
Design Thinking Process
Using the Design Thinking, in the first step we had to Empathize with the user,
which in this case is every person that navigates the city (either by public or private transport).
Firstly, we conducted a Secondary Research through the internet, in search of relevant articles
talking about this topic. We found pretty interesting articles from which we extracted useful
quantitative data.
"More than 4.3 billion people — or 55% of the world’s population live in urban settings today, and that number is expected to rise to 80% by 2050."
Our initial assumptions were that the public transport can be really unreliable sometimes, the streets in
big cities tend to be crowded streets, and the bike lanes are dangerous in most cities, as they are not clearly
delimited.
For that we set up a Miro board in which each member of the group added the information they found interesting
to share, and relevant to the investigation. Secondly, we handled the Primary Research where we conducted
interviews to day-to-day City Mobility Users. The first part was to brainstorm and set up the questions for
the user interviews.
Some answers from the interviewees
With our questions clearly defined, the group split and conducted two mock-up interviews in pairs. One acted as a moderator,
asking the actual questions to the interviewee, and the other took notes of the answers. This way we could practice our
interview skills and amend the questions if necessary.
Finally, we conducted the actual interviews with people outside Ironhack. Either in person or via the internet,
we asked our friends, family or acquaintances to be our “guinea pigs” and act as the users for our project.
We extracted valuable information that will be sorted and analysed.
With all our interviews insights in form of sticky notes, we created an Affinity diagram, where we started to sort them per themes or ideas, generating clusters of ideas that later we labelled. This way we had a clearer idea of the big picture. After this part, the team dot-voted which group seemed more relevant to them. In our case, the group Autonomy, freedom and flexibility was the most voted.
Autonomy, freedom and flexibility”, the chosen topic via dot voting
Parallelly, Each of us came up with 3 possible How Might We statements. An early exercise to find possible solutions
for the problems or issues our users have encountered.
Finally, with all the previous information gathered, we could generate a User Persona, a fictitious character
that more or less summarizes all the insights and ideas of our interviewees.
Please, meet Iris, our User Persona:
Iris here needed to explain her daily commuting to work, so we produced Iris’s Journey Map. A really useful tool to figure out how might a random working day of our User Persona go. Firstly, each of us independently drafted how we thought the Journey Map might look like, and after sharing and explaining it to the others. We voted which was the most accurate and combined the parts of each that in our opinion matched best our User Persona. From there, we arranged our refined and definitive Journey Map.
Firstly, we needed the definition of the Problem Statement. In this part, each of us had to try to define the Problem Statement for this project, having in consideration all the previous gathered info. After that all the team discussed and produced with the Final Problem Statement, the problem for which we will have to find a solution.
"Young, professional city dwellers need to find a cleaner way to move around the city quickly, independently and safely, because right now they feel constrained by the rigidity and unreliability of public transport, traffic jams and insecurities."
Now the fun begins. In this part, we could choose an exercise and try to come up with ideas to solve the problem at hand. We chose one called Crazy 8. It is an actually funny exercise, where each member of the group had to come up and sketch quickly an idea on how to solve the problem. One minute for each idea, up to a total of 8 ideas. After the brainstorming process, we voted on the most original and helpful ideas.
Team's Crazy 8s
We had to produce a non-digital solution and a digital solution (the actual App) for this problem. We came up with the following idea. The city provides free public transport tickets for the local population. This will be deduced of the local taxes. Visitors and tourists do not have access to this feature.
Locals application process to the free public transport program
This solution goes in conjunction with our app, which acts as a digital solution for this wicked problem.
It integrates:
Each of us came up with a prototype, all of us presented ours and voted the features/screens that we thought more useful. From there we assembled our first prototype.
Some screens for the first Low-fi iteration
After we assembled our final Low-fi, we conducted the Concept Testing with our interviewees.
Concept testing for our first Low-fi iteration
From what we learned from Concept Testing, we iterated our prototype and improved it. Below are some changes we made based on the insights of the people who tested the prototype:
Finally bellow you can try the Low-Fi prototype for this project:
There is a lack of solutions integrating all mobility-related data and options within a city, both public and private.
Currently, people value autonomy and freedom when they move around. The current systems in place are not able to
accommodate this need.
We want to test the idea further and keep iterating on the concept. We wound also like to deep-dive on the work
needed to make the non-digital initiative happen and explore the possibilities for agreement with private mobility
providers so all their data can be shown in one single App.
Finally, we would like to start the design process for a safety feature (not in the focus of our work, but mentioned
in the interviews).
This was our first UX project, and I am really proud of it. I have to thank my amazing teammates Tommaso, Corinne and Irina for this project, and I look forward to continue working with them. Of course, there is a lot of room to improve, but it set the foundations for a better understanding of what becoming a UX/UI designer means. Thank you for your time.
