EASY RIDE

OVERVIEW

MY ROLE

My role in this group project was research, prototyping, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design for mobile. 
Other team members: Jon O'Brien & Talia Glasman

CHALLENGE

Creating a mobile responsive ride-sharing application for seniors.

• Two-week Sprint
•  Team of three designers, four developers

TOOLS

• Pen & Paper
• Sketch
• Invision
• Principle

APPROACH

Together the team created individual user stories, which we took through the double diamond technique and 5 Whys to create our approach:

Improve accessibility (digital and physically).
Build and improve trust.
Address technology uncertainty.

PROCESS

DISCOVERY

USER BASED DESIGN STANDARDS

Initially I knew designing for seniors was going to be a challenge of itself. In retrospect, I realize I had a bias about who my "senior" was. That being said, I sought to find some best practices for designing for seniors. Based on some general research on senior usability needs (namely Smashing Magazine), initial principles were a revisiting point for me in the design process:

• Avoid font sizes smaller than 16 pixels (depending of course on device, viewing distance, line height etc.).
• Let people adjust text size themselves.
• Pay particular attention to contrast ratios with text.
• Provide subtitles when video or audio content is fundamental to the user experience.
• Some seniors have limited short term memory.

COMPETITIVE & COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Competitive research both enhanced and verified some of our user stories, which helped form key features for our first sprint. For example, competitors pointed to a feature calling to schedule, which we anticipated would be a big component of our design.  We also found that some of the big players in the ridesharing game were also testing out some senior specific options in key cities.

ELUSIVE SENIOR OPINIONS

Qualitative Interviews were insightful, but limited. As we began to realize based on our time constraint and resources, we might need to broaden our research a bit more, and added caretakers of people 65+ as well. We tweaked our questions based on interviews and then formed our questionnaires which we distributed to both seniors and caretakers. The biggest surprise was our “call to schedule” feature actually being perceived as a secondary want to using a web application, causing us to reevaluate the value of this feature. Additionally we found that seniors had a higher perceived ability with technology than we had anticipated. Our notions about who our users were shifted at this point to someone a lot less frail than we were hypothesizing. Using the data from both sets of responses, we were able to synthesize the data and create our two personas. 

SITE MAP & TAXONOMY 

Determining the site map and the taxonomy for this site ended up being a hiccup my team revisited a little more than I would have enjoyed. At this point we had the ambitions of wire framing the entire site, with mock-ups for an entire flow. Little did we know, two weeks tends to go by rather quickly.

SKETCHING FROM MOBILE TO DESKTOP

We began sketching as a team. We had a little design studio and began to compile our best ideas together. As we were tasked with creating something responsive, we began tackling mobile as our priority.

MOCK UPS, DIVIDED

Determining the site map and the taxonomy for this site ended up being a hiccup my team revisited a little more than I would have enjoyed. At this point we had the ambitions of wire framing the entire site, with mock-ups for two different flows. Little did we know, two weeks tends to go by rather quickly. We aimed to have one mock up done on mobile, and one done on desktop. Below is a selection of my mobile mock ups.

RETROSPECTIVE

This project was a bit of a challenge to work in a team with so many bold personalities, but it resulted in a lot of passion for our project. The underlier that helped us through many stopping points was resolving back to our MVP. Having simultaneous designing ended up being trickier than anticipated. Additionally, handing off a prototype, redlines, and assets to our dev team was a reminder for organization while working. In the future, I would love to have more access to seniors, to incorporate more of their perspective into our designs.

SPRINT 2

Below is a list of the features which remained in our backlog:

• Caregiver linked accounts
• Alerts for scheduled rides
• Call to schedule ride option
• Add to calendar options
• Driver accept/reject option
• Tutorial (vid or click through)
• Usability testing