THE RESEARCH

USER INTERVIEWS

To suss out if our hypothesis was accurate, and if our team was heading in a viable and valuable direction, we focused on finding the right users. Our method of finding the right users involved sending out a screener survey, particularly to those interested in sustainability practices, and currently engaged in those activities in their daily lives. After screening fourteen prospective subjects we discovered eleven were very interested in sustainable transportation and of those five were open to being interviewed by our team.

Our target demographic turned out to be adults under age forty, all of whom had a common, shared interest in educating themselves on sustainable green practices.

DATA SYNTHESIS

We learned a lot from our users and affinity mapping (mapping common themes found in the interviews) into categories was a big task. Our users had a lot to say!

These are the most common themes identified through user interviews and data synthesis:

• systemic change is more important than individual changes in sustainable advancements

• prefer to patron businesses that align with their values

• want to live more sustainably in the future and currently actively participate in many behaviors to live more sustainably today

• infrastructure barriers to access existing public transportation including

• like when their cities invest in sustainable transportation infrastructure

• associate sustainable living with values of honor, ethical base and admirable and feel that those who don’t lack compassion

• take time to research sustainable alternatives for products they want or need

• want easy access to sustainable information and initiatives that promote policy change and an eco-friendly lifestyle

Molly’s Frustrations

• Only systemic change will stop climate deterioration

• She hates researching green companies but feels it’s her responsibility

• She thinks the existing infrastructure needs a lot of work

How Might We…

provide Molly with sustainable solutions to and give her confidence that she is making the right choices to support an environmentally conscious lifestyle?

THE DESIGN

FEATURE PRIORITIZATION

One major insight that informed the development of our features was the overarching theme that our users don’t see sustainable transportation as a singular, isolated consideration…users don’t see sustainable behaviors as separated by categories.

Research showed that our core demographic takes a holistic view across multiple channels and experiences…not just transportation.

In our effort to prioritize potential product features we employed two methods to distill the core of what our user needs including the MoSCow method and a Feature Prioritization Matrix.

These tools helped us focus on the essentials while we benched “nice to have” options for future iterations and determined some features, deemed essential, would ultimately be too complex and costly to implement. All other essentials were incorporated into our MVP (minimum viable product).

From this point we created mid fidelity prototype to test our features with users and see if the features we created and the layout was navigable, learnable and clear. We created three scenarios and tasks around our MPV to test successes, failures and unclear paths for our users. Ultimately these test clarified some areas for improvement based on test results and general feedback provided by the first testing group.

MEDIUM FIDELITY & TESTING

We conducted a design workshop to ideate our MVP as a team, ultimately leading us to our digital mockups and the first iteration of our product. Once these were complete we created three tasks designed to assess the success of users’ ability to engage in the key features we created around:

• Planning a sustainable route

• Information on climate impact by transportation type

• Local transportation policies and initiative news and

• Updates and finally community space and initiatives

Insights around unclear and duplicative language, unnecessary navigation and more informed the design for our high fidelity prototype. More specifically, we learned that using the word “Green” twice on buttons caused confusion with users, so we changed wording for our next round of design.

The zip code section on the home screen was also confusing to users, so we removed this. These results of our testing helped us identify specific features that needed some re-thinking for our hi-fi prototype.

In keeping with the CRUD model (create, read, update, delete) we added new features to the hi-fi prototype including the option for users to create, login, edit and delete an account.

Then we moved on to round two testing of the high fidelity mockup with a new set of users employing the original scenarios and related tasks with the new group.

 MOCKUPS & TESTING

Mockups made significant improvements in:

success rate | time on task | easiness rating

Task three, around discovering the sustainability of transportation by type, was the only task we did not see an improvement on, so this is something to be addressed in future iterations.

CONCLUSION

FINAL DESIGN

After creating our responsive website for mobile and desktop, our next steps would be to recruit five participants to run a usability test on our desktop site using the same three task scenarios from our mobile tests

We’d test for time on task, direct success rate, and ease of use. From that point we’d collect user feedback and redesign until it fits the users needs and address any pain points encountered during user testing.

NEXT STEPS

Our team took a mobile first design approach and ran user testing only on the mobile prototype. Next steps would be to complete those same scenarios and tasks with users on the desktop version to make sure that the adaptive layout makes sense in both layouts.

We also had the opportunity to work with a team of developers and we watched them transform our prototype into a live desktop to mobile experience which was very rewarding. Talking to their team and learning about their needs, what worked and what didn’t in the handoff was immensely valuable. Mostly the handoff went well the only mild hiccup was that their team was designing desktop first so for our timeline our team expended most of our energy on the mobile version. It was a valuable partnership to be a part of.

This step allowed us to think beyond the design stage and focus on the larger team working on this project.

Making sure that our high fidelity mock-ups were as accurate as possible was important to ensure that our group was empathetic to the needs of the engineers and developers who are taking up the baton in this project.

The more we can help them by providing a complete, clear and comprehensive file the better for the entire team and ultimately the user.