Designing Traveling Mobile Application for Bikers- Case Study
Empathy and Research
“I’m going to design the best travel app for bikers!” I told myself after hearing about our first design challenge in a class, to design a traveling mobile application.
My friend Nika is never in town, from all of my friends he is the one who is always on a road traveling with his bike, so I decided to find out which apps he was using and if I could make a better one.
But I’ve never traveled with a bike, I had no idea what the process was like or what were the problems bikers facing during their trips. How could I design something that would enhance their experience?! I needed to make a solid research plan and find out everything about traveling with a bike. I went ahead and created proto persona, based on everything I knew about bikers from my friend Nika.
Joe Tintin (proto persona) is a 32 years old lawyer who loves his motorcycle, his goal is to find more time for traveling, he’s annoyed when bike breaks down on a road, or when he can’t find a good bar or a hotel to stay during his ride. After defining my proto persona, I started working on my research plan, on primary and secondary objectives, interview questions and my goal for this project. I have also downloaded every existing biker application in an app store to find out what my competitors were offering to users.
I conducted 5 interviews with bikers, and found out a surprising insight, none of them were depending on biker apps, most common application users were using during their travel were google maps(for directions), waze (to see the cameras on the road), weather app (for weather forecast) and TripAdvisor (to check where to eat, drink and ratings and reviews of the places)
In my surprise, for bikers there was almost no downside to road trip, most of them were even enjoying the motorcycle malfunction during the ride, like one of me interviewees said “it could become an adventure and a great chance to meet new people.” There was no significant preference between highways and off roads either. But one interesting pattern I noticed with every single interviewee was that all of them mentioned weather as their main pain point during the travel.
Based on my interview findings I created an affinity diagram and a survey with 10 questions, that would give me quantitative data about pain points and main factors that affected bikers’ trips. I didn’t want to depend on just online and went to a biker bar with my friend to get as many answers on my survey as possible. After getting my answers, I stayed and observed, users’ behaviors and conversations:
“We could go on a bike ride, tomorrow if it doesn’t rain” told my friend Nika to his biker friends in a bike bar, while simultaneously was checking the weather app on his phone. “Maybe I can find a route, with good weather”- he was going back and forth between GPS and weather apps trying to find a good route.
Survey cleared up that for the majority of people, main factor that affects their trip is weather. The number of people who prefer highway and off roads is almost equal. Regarding Pain points, on the first place there is weather uncertainty followed by Unexpected malfunction of a motorcycle.
At this point I already knew what was the biggest problem for my users. It was weather, to be more specific unpredicted weather change, and to be even more specific need to switch between 2 apps (weather and GPS) to find out if the trip would be successful. But weather can change during the ride and while driving bikers aren’t able to constantly check it since they are concentrated on a road and looking at directions.
After gathering significant amount of data, get to know my users closer and observe them in their natural environment, I made empathy map and created a User Persona!
I was ready for definition and ideation. I wrote user insight and HMW statement and combined them into problem statement. Wrote user stories followed by brainstorming and feature prioritization matrix.
I created value proposition, wrote user scenario and built storyboard and user journey based on that. I decided to name my app Fravel (Freedom+ travel)
After ideation, I moved to prototyping phase. I did careful analysis of my competitor’s apps and created a user flow for my application, which would be the GPS app with integrated live weather.
On the second step of the prototyping phase I made sketches from user flows and created digital wireframes.
First Iteration after Guerrilla Testing
Onboarding and rerouting after weather change notification tasks had 100% success rate. One user hesitated during Searching for the destination, but this task was still successful.
While looking for a detailed weather information had only 50% success rate, so it was clear for me that my design needed redesign and iteration, since main feature was not findable for half of my users. During usability testing I’ve also found out that bikers would like to have an options of other features in app, like to be able to see other people’s trips and be able to review and rate them, see what moto shows are happening during the year, look for the sights to visit that would be rated by other bikers. Be able to find good camping grounds and get an advice from other travelers about hidden gems in certain areas as well as pre organize and save a trip for the future. So I get to it and sketched new functionalities first and iterated digital wireframes based on my sketches.
In the video below, I demonstrate every user flow of the app, as well as visual design. You can find link for clickable prototype in the video description.
