Velvet Run: Re-designing a box bike rental app
UX/UI design, Research
BACKGROUND
Velvet Run is an intense two-week internship programme, where 6-8 aspiring designers complete one group project and one individual project with the help of mentors from Velvet agency. As an individual project, I chose to re-design an existing box bike rental service app.
CHALLENGE
The current system is not mobile-friendly and the rules are restricting for someone who spontaneously wants to rent a box bike.
SOLUTION
Create a mobile-friendly booking system for the bike rental service, while also improving the rules for booking. The 5-day project focused more on user experience and user journey and less on user interface design.
TIME
5 days
METHODS
Competitive analysis, user interviews, user testing, low-fidelity prototyping, and high-fidelity prototyping.
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam, Google Workspace, Adobe Suite
Discover
Analyze
The first step of the project was to get familiar with the company and how its system works. The bike rental service is meant for individuals as well as companies. They have 10 different types of box bikes, but in total there are 17 bikes, out of which 15 are electric bikes.
During the discovery phase, I also mapped out the whole user journey to understand the pain points.
Their current system allows people to rent a bike for 1 day to a maximum of 4 weeks. Booking can not be made on the same day, nor can it be started on the weekend. The PIN code for the bike cage is active 1 hour before and 1 hour after the booking time. The user must return the bike to the same place where they took it. There is a lower price for booking for a longer time.
Interview
I then conducted interviews with the users and a person from the bike rental company. Since the company is only managed by a few people (less than five), the booking system includes many manual steps (calling, writing to the company, etc.).
Competitive analysis
Last part of the discovery phase was conducting competitive analysis. For that, the following companies were analyzed: Citybike, A-bike, Bolt, Waypoint, Smart Bike, Tuul.
Define
In the defining phase, the potential users were mapped out. For this I asked the question “Who needs this the most? Why?”, following up with “Who doesn’t want to walk/use public transport or rent an electric bike? Why?”. This was to actually understand, who wants to use the box bike rental and why.
After that, user interviews with 5 people were conducted. The participants were chosen randomly on the street. It came out that the box bike rental service would be used more if it functioned the same way city bike rentals work (easily through an app). People also mentioned that they usually rent bikes spontaneously.
Ideate and Design
During the ideation and design phase, paper prototypes and wireframes were created for the new system. A detailed information architecture and user journey was also mapped out. Since the focus of the project was on user experience more than user interface design, only low-fidelity prototypes were created.
Conclusion
An easy project is not always an easy project - as I got deeper into the project, I realized that the system that exists now is there for a reason. That does not mean that improvements can’t be made, but it means a lot more needs to be changed than just the interface - the whole system needs a refresh.