urbi bikeshare

urbi bikeshare is a mobile bike sharing platform for iOS and Android devices. The service is available for travellers or residents in the City of Joondalup, located 25 km away from Perth, West Australia. Unlike the usual station-less (dockless) bike sharing platforms like Ofo or oBike, urbi provides bike rental service through its stations known as Urbi Bike Hire Station (or bike stations) located around the city within close proximity. This is to prevent the usual public hazard issues caused by users of dockless bike renting systems (user leaving bike haphazardly after using it).

Introduction

  • A mobile app for bicycle sharing (renting)
  • Fully-remote: UX/UI Design in Malaysia, App development in Vietnam, Deployed in Australia.
  • Iterative Design process: UI tweaked based on feedback from on-field testing in Australia.
  • User-centered mobile app design: Better transparency and visibility on transaction details, booking management and bike return process.

Understand: Business Requirements

After the platform completed its trial run, the project team commissioned on a brand design update which includes user feedbacks from the trial. As a result, a brand guideline was established with recommendations on how the updated visual assets can be used across different marketing communication materials. However the stakeholders felt that some of the major usability concerns are not being addressed including:

  • Ensuring a smooth onboarding process for new users
  • Introduce improvements for user to easily manage and track their bookings
  • Introduce an improvements for user to easily return their bike or get help from the support team easily

Understand: Challenges

The updated mobile app will be required to incorporate design cues from the new brand guideline. This will ensure that brand consistencies can be maintained across different marketing channels.

To improved app would also require to address several usability issues from its current version such as:

  • Legibility and contrast due to small text sizes and background colours that were too close to the content/text colours.
  • Visual hierarchies of UI elements which may require user to squint or tap repeatedly on a button.

Define: Project Focus

With the main concerns outlined, I had distilled few key outcomes that will affect the design considerations:

Business outcome(s): Drive more new customer sign-ups, increased in-app engagements or usage and reduced customer complaints from improved user satisfactions on services.

User outcome(s): Improved user’s commuting lifestyle or happiness due with better commute options provided by urbi.

Define: Key User Journeys

Several user journeys (screen flows) are defined to help stakeholders to have a better overall view on the improved checkout experience, and development team to have a better grasp on the technical implementations that is required for the project:

User journey 1: New user sign up and onboarding
User journey 2: Locate and book a new bike from Hire Station
User journey 3: Returning bike to Hire Station
User journey 4: Applying promo code to a booking
User journey 5: Reaching out to support team for help

Solution: Improved convenience and reduced frustrations with contextually aware mobile app

With Bluetooth beacons installed on the Hire Stations, user will be able to accurately discover up-to-date information on available bikes remaining and distance to the station. This significantly reduces guesswork and only to be disappointed if there are no more bikes at a particular location. Total amount of available bikes are only displayed on Station Details page to reduce visual noise especially when there are many stations can appear within the map view.
To reduce booking errors, HIRE option would only be made available when user are in close proximity to a Hire Station. The same concept applies for user with active bookings, which they will only able to return the bike when the app detects itself near a Hire Station. Note the call-to-action are updated depending on the booking status (HIRE / RETURN).
Warm colours on timer are applied as visual cue to express a sense of urgency in remaining booking time before user will get additional charges. 5 minutes prior to the booking expiry, user will receive a notification (push notification / in-app notification) to extend or return their bike.
Role
  • Visual Design
  • Interaction Design
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Year Completed

2017