A Case Study on Urban Mobility
by Smooth Sailing
Smooth Sailing is a team of four future-thinking UX/UI design students who worked together to solve some common frustrations and fears that city travelers experience when traveling in large cities.
the problem.
Many people who travel to and within the city — whether by car, train and metro, bicycle, e-scooter, or on foot — experience frustration and, sometimes, fear. When using a car, there can be too much traffic, issues with driving safely, expensive or difficult-to-find parking, and the general expense of gas and car maintenance.
When using the public metro and bus system, there are problems with buses or trains being late, being too crowded, with there not being enough connections within and around the city, and with the general ugly and unpleasant aesthetics of the metro stations and trains.
For people who rely on riding their bicycles or walking, many cities are not structured to create convenient, safe lanes and spaces for bikers or pedestrians. Cyclists and pedestrians often have to cross busy roads and intersections, or walk or ride alongside cars going at high speeds. Drivers sometimes do not see cyclists coming down the road next to them and veer to the side or open car doors and hit them. Pedestrian sidewalks are often crowded and do not have space for certain people with disabilities, or for other non-motorized forms of transportation. There is often the feeling that all forms of travel are squished together into too narrow and congested a space.
our solutions.
With our design, we addressed safety and reliability of transportation options, and also city travelers’ enjoyment of their chosen modes of transit, with a goal to harmonize all modes into a streamlined and super-attractive system. We designed:
- A tiered city layout with a hyper-modern metro system;
- A method to keep most cars out of the city altogether; and
- Numerous expansive green spaces that are both beautiful and safe for pedestrians, cyclists, people with disabilities, children, and pets.
our goal.
The purpose of our project was to create a safer, sexier, and more reliable public transportation system with the goal of attracting many more people to choose to use it over driving their private cars to and fro’. We wanted to cater to many types of travelers — those commuting in from outside the city, those who travel across the city by subway, buses, or shared rides, and also to cyclists, pedestrians, and users of other non-motorized transport. So, we needed to design an entirely new system that met the needs of many folks, including those who still want to drive their private cars to (but not within) the city.
We viewed the users of our design as anyone who lives in, visits, and/or moves around within a city. Our goal was to make a safer space for anyone, whether older or younger, high speed business executive or contract worker, runner or cyclist or unhoused person, with disabilities or not, and to create a space that everyone would find beautiful and nourishing to the human spirit!
Our team of four — having just met each other the same morning at Ironhack — met in person for many hours over the course of one week to work on our design. Often, we also continued to collaborate at night from home via Zoom or Slack because we needed to meet a tight deadline. We did not begin with specific individual roles, but over the course of a few days, it became apparent that we each had complementary strengths to contribute, such as writing content and verbal communication, organizing information and data gathered, thinking through technological aspects, facilitating balanced conversation and process, coming up with killer ideas, and drawing compelling images and designs.
We were given our assignment in the afternoon on Monday, and had a strict presentation deadline of 10am on Friday of the same week. This meant that, in addition to attending lectures each weekday, we met for a few hours on Monday, and 6–8 hours on Tuesday through Thursday, and then awoke quite early to finish up some presentation details by 10am on Friday. We stayed up late many nights, collaborating or working on individual parts of the project from home. All being newbies to UX/UI design, we had to troubleshoot and think through problems as we went along, and we also had to learn how to communicate effectively with each other in a fairly stressful situation.
our process.
Our process involved a series of steps centering around user research (qualitative surveys and quantitative interviews), data assessment, using our findings to develop several user personas, creating a design that we felt would be very useful to our users, user-testing the design through conversations with real users, and then presenting our design to our teachers and classmates for feedback.
more specifically…
We brainstormed what URBAN MOBILITY means and the issues surrounding it in most cities. We focused on the interrelation of private driver cars, public transportation (buses and trains), pedestrian activity (walkers, cyclists) and e-vehicles.
Next, we created a survey to source information from the general public. Questions were aimed toward peoples’ travel habits, attitudes around these various modes of transportation, and issues they experienced while moving to and within a city.
We posted our survey to various platforms, including: Reddit, Medium, Facebook and sent it to friends and family, looking for a variety of different experiences. After gathering 72 responses (over the course of 12 hours), we developed a series of qualitative questions based on the information we culled.
From here, we interviewed 5 people of various backgrounds who had optionally chosen to give us their email addresses in the survey, taking notes while asking them about their personal journeys commuting to and within the city.
We took this information and broke it down into digestible pain points and highlights, creating Affinity Maps for each interviewee. Then, through a voting process, we honed in on a few areas of focus for our design — Safety, Reliability, and Desirability.
Then, noticing how many interviewees had written comments about wanting fewer cars on city roads, we came up with two connected “How Might We” questions: 1) How might we reduce the numbers of private cars on city roads? and 2) How might we make public transportation sexy again?
techniques.
We used an exercise called BAD IDEA to get the creative ball rolling. Each of us quickly wrote or sketched five terrible ideas for how to answer our How Might We questions, posted them all on the wall, laughed a lot, and then voted for which of the ideas we each thought could actually be turned into quite good ones! We wound up choosing three and synthesizing them into a concept for an entirely new urban transportation system.
Our goals became to: 1) Significantly limit the number of cars that entered the city, while providing them a place to park; 2) Create an elevated metro
“Tubeway” system of translucent capsules, allowing for quick, sleek, and comfortable travel; And 3) To then free up space for the creation of much more green space and safer pedestrian, bike, and other non-motorized vehicle pathways.
Analyzing the data we gathered from several different types of city travelers, we then developed three user personas with whom to test our design: 1) Rose, a 47-year-old high level professional and mother who commutes into the city in traffic by car; 2) Sophia, a 25-year-old graduate student who crosses the breadth of city every day using the metro to get to class; and 3) Henry, a 35-year-old man who works from home and uses his bicycle to run errands around the city, or walks to go on dates with his partner.
user journeys & storyboards.
Next, we created user journeys to map out the emotional experience of each persona as they traveled to or within the city. We used these to make detailed storyboards for each persona to understand a bit more about the problems they faced with their current modes of transportation and how we could ease their journeys.
After this, we brainstormed about our tubeway system and how it would connect to various parts of the city, and also about how passengers would access it, or where on the outskirts of the city drivers to the city would park their cars. One team member made a very detailed sketch of an overall city layout, with a flower-shaped design for the elevated tubeway system, while I made more zoomed in sketches of what various aspects of the transit might look like, or how they might function.
Fun ideas were tossed around, like having the tubeway system be made of a new material called “kyuss” that responds to magnetism and can thus levitate in the sky. Another beautiful idea was to have the tops of all stations (which are high rise pillars with huge elevators inside to get passengers to the boarding area) become lovely garden spaces with views out over the city.
more about our design.
I spent a lot of time conceiving of the UI and UX design of the tubeway itself, opting for transparent tubes and pods, and for several different types of pods based on passenger needs: a regular but comfy passenger pod, a business pod with small, fold out standing and sitting desks, and for longer commutes, a lounge pod with a bar that serves coffee, tea, drinks, and light fare. Each pod contains numerous convenient charging ports, several ways to sit or stand, a water dispenser, and each orients passengers outward toward the view rather than having them stare awkwardly inward at each other.
We also designed a way for damaged pods, or those containing someone having an emergency, to quickly leaving the tube via a separated pathway and be rushed to the hospital or repair station (after allowing other passengers to move onto other pods, of course!)
We decided to have cars park in green berms on the outskirts of the city, with shuttles or beltways to transport people up to ground level. We decided that the only individual vehicles allowed within the city would be ambulances, fire trucks, and small rentable e-vehicles used to deliver goods or transport tools and other items. Each of these would run on designated tracks and rarely, if ever, cross at the same pathway level as a pedestrian or cyclist.
We drew all of this out in a very simplified way (given the time constraints) and put together a presentation of our user data, our personas and storyboards, and our fancy new design. We gave a 10-minute presentation and received strong positive (and some helpful constructive) feedback from our teachers and classmates.
things i learned.
In the end, I found this first design project to be quite enjoyable, with a huge learning curve. My teammates and I went through several phases of learning to communicate and collaborate effectively and each gradually found our niche. We learned a good bit about various users’ experiences with and opinions regarding city mobility, and learned about our own capacity as beginning UX/UI designers to dream big, but also fairly realistically, and come up with a super-cool concept for how to address the issues city travelers face. While we wound up designing an entirely new city layout, we also realized that various elements of our overall design could be implemented in many cities around the world right away, if the resources were present there.
in hindsight.
In hindsight, if we were to go through a similar process together, I personally would spend more time on my storyboards and sketches in order to show more clearly the design and vision we had in mind. I would recognize that these visuals can make or break a sale to my audience, and are incredibly useful for communication. I would also hope to chat with my teammates at the outset about our communication styles and preferences to make sure that each person felt respected and heard throughout the process. Healthy communication and space for each team member to be heard is essential to creating the most well-thought-out design!
