Challenge 1: How not to get lost in the jungle called Berlin?!
Imagine you have just moved to a new city which you know nothing about. Everything is different, hard to understand. You have no car, so the only solution to get from A to B is using public transport. You can find multiple options to choose from and make your life easier.
Berlin is a struggle when you come over here for the first time. Luckily, there’s a BVG app that helps with getting around the city and buying the tickets. What if we want to travel to another city or even country? Well, then we need to download another app. Luckily, there’s an app that helps us with public transport no matter where we are. Let’s check Citymapper!
Citymapper- what’s that?
Citymapper was founded in London in 2011 by Azmat Yusuf, a former Google employee. The company describes its app as a public transport app and mapping service which displays transport options. It’s free of charge for their users but they also have a premium version available. Currently, Citymapper is available in 58 cities.
It looks amazing, but what’s wrong with Citymapper?
I interviewed 5 of my friends who have recently moved to Berlin from different countries. I asked them some questions regarding their daily transport routine and what’s the biggest struggle they are facing since they have moved to Berlin. Each of them used the BVG App before, they heard about Citymapper but never used it in Berlin. I asked my friends to:
- Download both apps to their phones.
- Search for route options using both apps from point A (their homes) to point B (Alexanderplatz).
- Choose the best route option.
- You need to buy a ticket.
All of my friends were able to find the best route options using both apps. They were able to easily check the prices and purchase tickets via BVG App. Unfortunately, each of them gave up on Citymapper after searching for ticket prices and any “buy ticket” button. All of the users said they preferred to use different apps in different cities and being able to buy tickets instead of using an app where they can only chack route options. Buy ticket option is crucial here. Without it, Citymapper is similar to Google Maps with a different layout.
Azmat Yusuf and his employees did a great job designing the app. However, the main disadvantage of their app is the lack of ticket purchasing options. Today, I’d like to try finding a solution.
How Citymapper can be useful in every country?
Since we don’t want Citymapper to be a copy of Google Maps, the best solution would be adding ticket purchasing options. However, every city has different tickets, we should take into consideration different currencies in the countries where Citymapper is available. There are multiple payment options available- PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc.
All of my friends told me they’d like to have everything integrated together. They didn’t want to switch from one card to another or from one payment option to another. The solution I came up with was “Citymapper Wallet”. It will be a virtual purse/ card which can be connected with your bank account, credit or debit card, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or PayPal. When you want to put money in your Citymapper Wallet you simply go to settings and search for Wallet. By clicking on it you will be forwarded to your wallet. There, you can check how much funds do you have available, below it you can go to payments and your recent purchases. In “Payments” you will be able to choose which payment options do you want to connect with your wallet. It can be more than one choice. “Recently purchased” will show you how much money and when did you put in your wallet.
Now when we have our payment options connected, we should buy our tickets! Starting from the main screen first, we choose our route. On the second screen with the route’s options, we will find now information about which ticket should be purchased, next to it there will be the price for it and after clicking on the price we will be able to buy this ticket using “Citymapper Wallet”.
Sometimes we know where we want to go and how to get there, we don’t need to check it. In the settings, there will be an option “My Tickets” where we will be able to buy tickets of our choice or check recently purchased tickets.
Not as difficult as it seemed!
Since this was my first UX/UI designing task I definitely learned not everything that seems so difficult at the beginning has to be difficult. I was avoiding writing this article because it was something new and I wasn’t sure I would make it right. Definitely, prototyping is quite complex because you should put in only the most important information and not be super accurate.
