“There are no facts inside your building. So get outside” - Steve Blank
Challenge
This project was part of a two day UX Training course in Dublin, Ireland.
The challenge was to learn about the ticket-buying process on the Dublin bus, as well as investigate how someone would buy a weekly or monthly travel pass.
As I had to travel to Dublin to attend the course, I had the perfect opportunity at the airport, when I needed to make my journey into the city centre.
Already at this stage, I learned that there is no change given back when paying the bus ticket with cash, but a receipt which can be taken to the ticket office to reclaim the change.
Dublin bus company and their users
In small groups we discussed the Business goals for the Dublin Bus and Customer goals.
About the customer we were going to interview, we knew the following:
they are all regular Dublin Bus users
they at least use the bus twice per week
they pay by cash or Leap Card
have a smartphone
are daily internet users.
User Interviews
In groups of three we interviewed three Dublin bus customers.
We asked them about where they live and why they use the bus. Some questions regarding their commute and how they buy the tickets. We learned about what works well for them and where there are pain points.
Together with everyone from the workshop we gathered all the information on a board and used an affinity diagram to group all the items.
User Personas
With all the information sorted it became clear that there are a few different type of users. Each group focused on one particular user and created a persona.
Each persona included context information, goals and behaviours.
Field Work
In the next part of this project we did some observation “in the wild”.
We wanted to observe, what people are doing and asking when they got on the bus. How they are paying for the ticket and observe if there are any pain points.
We were also given a small mission. Find a specific location and get there by bus.
Unfortunately it was not possible to find out by reading the bus information and was very confusing (which you can tell by this photo of me).
UX Design
User Stories
We chose the user ‘Tourist’ and on the second day of the workshop we wrote down possible user stories.
The structure of a story is to give it some context (physical / social environment), a plot (goals, challenges, actions, decisions and informations), tools (what the user uses to help achieve their goals) and an outcome (the result of the customer using the product).
Goals and Settings
Part of the user stories was to also look into the Experience goals, End goals and Settings for the user persona.
For our user, the tourist, we decided to focus on:
visit all main attractions in the city,
good value for money,
and only need one ticket / app ticket for all purposes.
User needs and Actions
As one of the last tasks, we looked into identifying the users needs and interactions, which we later mapped out in a flow chart.
Conclusion
In this project I learned that there are multiple types of users who use the Dublin bus. We got to know their user needs and pain points, and also got to experience some of them ourselves.
We worked as a team to map out user stories and which actions are needed in the application to suite multiple user types.