Process

Lime Scooter Pop-up Event

We invited ourselves to an introductory event to demo Lime’s e-scooters along Collins Street. Unplanned but we found it to be quite meaningful.

Lime wanted to introduce implementing e-scooters in Melbourne, discussing their positive benefits and impact. They discussed that we would need to convince the local government –

there are issues with the laws and limitations regarding helmets and electronic scooters – preventing commercial e-scooter services in Melbourne

We gained first-hand experience - we got to trial ride their e-scooters which was in fact smooth and easy to ride on our first go.

The people who attended this event are actually locals keen to be using e-scooters; Lime supporters; those from inter-state, Brisbane, who want to help Melbourne implement e-scooters like they successfully have; and locals who were just curious and randomly signed up. And that’s where we took the opportunity to network and learn more about people’s personal thoughts about why e-scooters would be good for Melbourne just by having casual conversation. We grabbed attendees’ contact details so we could contact them again to help us develop in our design process – because we realised THEY ARE our target user. It felt like we were ‘stealing’ Lime’s customers for our idea – however we were only harmless, beady-eyed students. From the event, we also managed to get free food, drinks and goodies – maybe it was a sneaky way to win us Melburnians over.

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Why don’t you people ride bikes?

Survey

We did some field work and went around the city to approach 50+ members of the general public – referring to locals and those familiar of the urban environment.

Our aim was to find out the various reasons behind why people choose not to ride bikes. And what would make them want to ride e-scooters.

“(e-scooters) looks effortless. Because When you ride a bike to work, you might end up all sweaty and feel tired when you get to work.”  
“I already rely on PT, so there is no reason to ride a bike – good enough for me”
‍“In Europe, we don’t usually wear helmets. By law we must, but I don’t want to wear a helmet.”
“(e-scooters) are lower on the ground so it looks safer if I were to fall compared to bikes.”

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People were only familiar of bikes at this moment, and this was the only way how people would understood what we were asking from them.

With this, we thought, could applying this pre-conceived knowledge about bikes, also apply to the fate of e-scooters in the future?

There was a bigger problem in our hands.

E-scooters are difficult to implement as they are difficult to be accepted by the general public due to the various reasons in the bar chart above. The most common reasons were because of safety concerns and they preferred PT. But these were out of our control and couldn’t do anything about it as it wasn’t our focus. However, people could still imagine their life with the shared e-scooters and at least will give it a try. Which still gave us hope.

A lot of views towards e-scooters were negative because it is mostly people’s bad habits that is influencing the bad attitudes against bike sharing. This has mainly been due to the mistreatment of the rental bikes around Melbourne (and Australia-wide). Hence, what we’re trying to do is influence them and shift their habits and thinking through a seamless experience where they are trying to not put effort.

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Questionnaire

So what’s it gonna take?

This is where our networking contacts came in handy along with some participants we surveyed who were keen on the idea of e-scooters. We focused on narrowing down our target customers to those who were already active or interested in bike-riding, or in the idea of e-scooters as a form of transport or even as a leisurely service.

We asked 20+ participants to complete a questionnaire.We had a fair range of participants with 1 in 3 who do ride bikes and then 31.3% who still chose to not ride bikes in any given circumstances. The responses were reminding us why the bike sharing culture wasn’t successful and were similar to the survey results.  

11 participants had already had some experience with e-scooters and here’s what we gathered;

We wanted to understand what factors motivates them to ride a bike or e-scooter if there was something interesting.They were interested in seeing rewards, more interaction, community aspects, activities and races.

“Shaheen argues that for transportation apps to achieve/sustain growth, they should adopt strategies around time savings, financial savings, incentives and gamification” (Shaheen et al. 2017). Gamification … is arguably a key factor in driving user engagement. Several transportation apps currently on the market gamify the user experience, through the integration of leaderboards, badges, levels, points, and progress bars, in addition to other engagement tools. The navigation app, ‘Waze’, rewards users with points for providing traffic data and warnings of road hazards”

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User Persona

From the previous research, we were able to build and envision a profile of our customer.

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Designing the Strategy

For our solution, we concluded to design additional features to the existing functionality of scooter-sharing apps. Based on the suggestions we received in the questionnaire – we expanded to review what works best. There were so many that we got really confused.

Would it be better to have a point system or a coin system? Would it be better to earn badges or level up every certain time?

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Wireframing and Information Architecture

We wire-framed the process in rough sketches behind how the incentives and strategies would work in the app – what content and info to provide for the users. Will we have a function where you could turn challenge mode on or off? Where are certain icons going to be?

Revising the information architecture involved a lot of re-structuring of the app’s wireframes to include the things that users asked for and how our additional incentives would flow within the app. Like if wallet and rewards were the same thing. We just had to ensure we split them into where they belonged.

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Design Solution

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E-tron is theorised as an additional part of the Audi company, but another generation. Designed in the future where maybe 5 years or 10 or 20 years from now, Melbourne has successfully implemented shared-mobility, including e-scooters.

Building User Engagement

The for the final concept was to create an app and riding experience so that users would see the value in using e-scooters. Game and social features, along with financial incentives to help build user engagement.

It promotes long-term on-going use - rewards and coupons will encourage customers to come back and continue riding e-scooters around the city.

We hope the E-tron app will help change user perceptions of e-scooters as a novelty, but rather, also a mode of transport for getting around. It can also cater to various users - from tourists who want to explore the city, to locals commuting to work or running errands.

UI

While we didn’t have time to refine the user interface design – animations are designed for each feature. We want our users to interact, not only with the features that we offer, but also the app itself. By adding transitions and animations, the users are able to be more engaged with the app and immerse themselves in E-tron world.

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“You solved the ambitious but important task - raising the engagement of users of a sharing service, quite well and presented solution approaches. Which can solve a lot of problems in today’s urban societies. By addressing user needs like urban awareness and gamification, you found promising sustainable business strategies of how to build interesting business networks to improve the social awareness. You showed that you understood how to work very systematically on quite a complex problem with several possible solutions and how to derive focused strategies to address the existing problems.”

Thorsten Schrader, AUDI AG

Retrospective 

Teamwork

In a group project, there were no roles established between the three of us who knew nothing of UXD in the beginning… we each had different capabilities and strengths to bring to the table apart from communication design. As time progressed, we each somehow found ourselves fall into a role naturally and always worked together on everything. We learned to work in a team dynamic of our own as this project was really enjoyable and fruitful.  

My Role

I came to be the project manager. Planning our time efficiently in a short span, always keeping on track of the problem and research question, overlooking the bigger picture. However, I also took on multiple roles and learned of the many skills of a user experience designer. I was a graphic designer, researcher, data analyst, project manager, product designer, producer, camera-man, editor, director, business strategist and possibly many more that I didn’t realise.

Technology in the Future

The subject of autonomous vehicles and e-scooters are technological trends in a progressive world beginning to evolve. E-scooters in Melbourne is a good concept in theory but difficult in practice at the moment. I know that in the future it’s possible. We had to think very futuristic, which was sometimes difficult because we were basing on the prior knowledge of today’s bike culture. So, I had to envision a fast-forward world to enable a successful project outcome.

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