A practice activity involving research, task flow diagrams and requirements. The process I went through for working out the UX is shown below. I didn't do a redesign of an established app because a redesign doesn't take into account the market factors for why an app may have been formed in a specific way.
The first stage was to research how other ride-sharing apps are designed. Some of these flows are below. Rather than go through every detail I focused on the primary function of a transport app and that is to be able to get from point A to point B.
The next step involved gaining some insight into the market and seeing what people require out of their transportation. I used this recent study to gain some insights into how people were travelling
http://www.bvrla.co.uk/sites/default/files/documents/jamie_chan-pensley_traveller_needs_uk_capability_study.pdf
and decided that it might be possible to change the UX in a manner that might attract frequent "default motorists" which was 26% of the UK population.
This market lived in smaller urban centers and suburbs where public transport is more infreqeuent yet they were also considered a large working age segment.
I formed a persona of Gary using some of the information present in the study.
I decided that if the UX was changed in a manner that allowed for a recurring ride that it might suit this category and could be used daily to and from work. I nicknamed the new app Briefcase Traveller and sketched out some rough flows for the basic functionality of the app which would be travelling from point A to point B similar to the research, one of which can be seen below.
This gave me a rough idea of what UI elements would be neccessary to ensure point A to point B functionality. I split the app in 'half' allowing for a one off trip and setting up recurring trips from the splash page on app open. I re-named the one-off trip and recurring trip to Go Now and Go Daily and moved away from the nickname Briefcase Traveller to the more catchy Go-Go. I created a task flow diagram to show how a Go Now trip would be completed from app open. See below the final task flow diagram.
Following the task flow diagram I began to develop a low fidelity wireframe using Adobe XD. I focused on two common use cases for a single trip.
- A person who is some location away from home looking to return home. (Current Location - Home)
- A person checking the cost or booking a trip between two new locations (New Location - New Location)
The first greyscale low fidelity wireframe video is below (Go-Go UX 1). I made sure to include what was shown to be important functions and information displayed across all the researched apps. The main points that users gave during feedback was that the set pickup page seemed unneccessary and that the general layout felt a bit cramped. Some of these changes can be seen in the second wireframe video (Go-Go UX 2).
After these changes were made it became apparent that users rarely used the list icon next to the address search bars as they would select the text boxes to input the address. This was changed to a quick favourite toggle allowing regularly addresses to be saved quickly so they would pop up in the address selection lists. These changes are shown in the second low fidelity wireframe video (Go-Go UX 2).
The third wireframe (Go-Go UX 3) is a high fidelity wireframe video showing a more spacious user interface and how colours help with defining spaces in the user interface.
(Please note, there were several more iterations between these that only contained minor changes or had changes not used in the final wireframe).