Carris Project
Disclaimer: This is a purely Academic Project, with no affiliation with the aforementioned company.
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The Challenge
During my UX/UI Design course we were presented with three challenges. For me, the Carris Project was the most interesting one. We were a Team of three people (Carolina Silva, Tiago Fortuna and myself) and we were able to contribute in all stages of the process. The briefing was to improve the existing Carris APP and create a new feature for it.
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Details
Client
Student Project at EDIT Academy
Sector
Public Transportation
My Role
Entire product design from research to
conception, visualization and testing
conception, visualization and testing
Project Time
1 month
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Research first
As any project, our first step was Research. We wanted to understand if people used the app and what was their opinion about it. For that we consulted the Google Play store (place with the most reviews). Here we were able to understand that the app had some issues related to the accuracy of information and coherency of performance.
Heuristics time!
After having the opinion of the users, we wanted to understand what worked and what could be improved. With our analysis we were able to understand that the iconography was confusing and there were tabs and buttons that didn’t perform the correspondent actions. On the bright side, we found the color scheme pleasant and the map was very present with a lot of relevant information.
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Going to the streets
After knowing what the user’s thought and what needed to be improved in the App was time to understand who our user’s were and what features they would like to see. In order to do this, we continued with our desk research and also made a questionnaire so we could reach as many people as possible. From this we understood that the most frequent users were working people and students and they would like to be able to pay for their monthly ticket through the mobile app, and also have it in a digital form. After all this, we finally had our personas.
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Susana
This persona was provided by our teachers, but we were able to see her in our results as well. She is a 35 year old nurse that does home care assistance, which translates into her schedules
Needs
She needs to be able to plan her journeys
She needs to have the optimal route to be able to go to all the places she needs on time
She needs to have everything digital, so she doesn’t have to carry a lot of cards
Challenges
She loses papers and cards all the time
She is not from Lisbon, so she has a hard time getting around
She doesn’t have time to wait in queues in order to buy her ticket
Luís
As we had to create another persona apart from the one provided, Luís came naturally.
He is 25 years old, single and is a call center agent with a fixed schedule from 9am until 6pm. He works from Monday to Friday.
Needs
Would like to optimize his time, as he doesn’t like to wait for transportation
He enjoys those 5 extra minutes in bed, so being able to know the timetables with accuracy and precision is really important
Challenges
Being able to track transports in real time
Plan his journey with efficiency (in order to commute)
Sometimes he oversleeps and loses the first transport, so he never knows at what time the next one arrives or if there are disturbances with the transports.
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Insights
So, here we were able to understand that our Personas needed the option to buy and have their tickets in the app itself. Furthermore, having live feedback on route and about waiting times was also very important.
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Let’s build this puzzle…
Based on the insights gained we defined the screens that we needed and the App map. Then we were able to build Task Flows.
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Time was a challenge as well, so we did our paper wireframes and they were quickly turned into these mid-fidelity prototypes so we would be able to test them with users. With these tests we learned that the moment of the login would have to come later than what we had anticipated in this initial plan. Also we learned that the method of payment needed to appear before the confirmation message. Now it was time to build the final product.
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Before and After
On the left side we have a still image of the current App of Carris.
On the right side, we have a live test of our final design, where the User is buying the ticket within the App.
Conclusion
In the end we were happy with our creation. We are aware that is not ground breaking adding a digital ticket to an App, but we feel that we catered to the needs that we collected from our Users.
With more time we would like to be able to demonstrate the following features, also designed within the app: direct connection to Spotify, in order to be able to listen to music during your trip; “Share” button connected to Facebook that allows the user to share his journey (live or just the route); live notifications that tell you when the bus is arriving and when you are reaching your destination.
If there was the possibility of taking this to the actual company, we would like to have understood what kind of system is being used to feed the App, in order to be able to determine the root cause of the lack of accuracy in information that is being provided to the users.
This was the assignment that I felt most confident doing, as we worked really well as team and we all had the opportunity to go through all the fases of the UX and UI process together, making unanimous group decisions.
