Role:

UX Designer

Year & Duration:

2020 (5 Days)

‘Design a route selection feature for a navigation app to encourage tourists to take more walking routes in cities.’

The goal of this design challenge is to help solve environmental issues through design, align with user needs and business perspectives. As a result, there are one feature was designed for Google Maps to help tourists discover more attractions on the route, so that they are more encouraged to take a talk to their destination.

— Transportation is contributing to 29% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The production of fashion industry and the waste of purchasing unessaery fashion items are always a big problems, since it has a big impact of the enviourment and resources. Helping the consumer to utilize their cloths and purchase wisely would optimise the situation, and also pointing on the consumer daily painpoint.

Researches and stats suggests that a significant part of city carbon emission is tourism

“When you walk, you’re utterly in touch with the drama of the city.” - Vivian Gornick

If more people choose walking instead of driving, the traffic, as well as the damage to the environment, will be vastly reduced. For tourists especially, walking in the cities is always one of the best ways of experiencing the city.

The Challenge

Before start off, I devised the plan for this challenge to make it achievable in 7 days as well as meeting the assessment criticia.

Define a clear target: Design one feature that makes the walking route attractive and also beneficial for the product business goal
Get into the scenario, understand the travelers and their pain points as well as their needs
Analyze the mostly used navigation Apps and choose one to work on further, learn about its current features and the business objectives
Align business with user needs, and design solution which makes both sides beneficial

Get to know the user

Five people have been interviewed, their answers suggests that weather, route walking condition and the amount of attraction are the motivation for taking more walk.

With a clearer strategy and goal, it’s time to get to know the users:

How do tourists move around on city trips?
How do they make decisions for choosing the best way to get their destination?
What influences their decisions?
What makes them happy and what frustrates them?
What navigation tools do they use, what is their experience with them?

The result of the interview was collected in affinity diagram

Jump in the game

3 navigation Apps were analyzed, as a result Google Maps was the one I decide to continue work on further.

Google Maps has the most users, with the accurate route calculation, extremely user-friendly interface, and great reviews make it the most popular navigation App.

Citymapper is now available for many big cities, it provides the most actual innercity mobility options, with a focus on walking and biking experience.

Apple Maps is not as popular as Google maps and has limited features to match tourists´ needs., and great reviews make it the most popular navigation App.

competitor audit of three most used navigation Apps

Competitor Test

During user interview and product analysis, I learned CityMapper has a walking route navigation that encourage user to walk more, to find out if the feature works for the tourists, I ran a competitor test

The result of the interview was collected in affinity diagram

The calorie amount that is burned by walking to the destination is provided as additional information on the result screen, and route selection is labeled by ‘Fast’ and ‘Main road’.
I found two interviewees who I talked to (not Citymapper user) from the interview, asked them to search a walking route with CityMapper. However, they both didn’t react very positively to the interface. I learned that the travellers are:

not keen to lose more energy
skeptical about the route labeling (fast and main road) and
feeling unmotivated for taking a walk without knowing the potential point of interest on the route

Ideation and integration

After brainstorming and prioritisation, I decide to design a feature that help the users to discover highlights on their walking routes.

‘Discovering Routes’ aims to help the user discover more attractions, shops and restaurants in the walking route navigation screen. I created wireframe and user-flow to make sure the feature fully integrated in current Google Maps App, and draw a storyboard to tell the story.

Wirefame sketch

Storyboarding

1. Get aligned with the existing features

In Google Maps, there is a feature ‘Explore’ when the user opens the map that helps them to explore more about their current spot. The ‘Explore’ feature is one of the sources that suggest the user where to go next. The new ‘Discovering Routes’ feature would be one more detailed level to expand the exploration.

‘Discovering Routes’ as one more level of exploration for current ‘Explore’ feature

2. Align user needs with business objectives

It is fantastic that the tourists are now able to make their trips more exciting, but what about the business owner user group? The ‘Discovering Routes’ feature is also completely fitting to the business objective of Google My Business, as it has great potential for discovering retail business and provides its customers with an even more seamless experience.

Discover stops on a walking route

‘Discovering Routes’ suggests the user some highlights that are scattered along the route, therefore tourists could get the most out of their walks, as a complete newcomer to the city.

Save/edit and share a route

During the walk, it’s common that the user checks Google Maps for something else, to make sure all the effort they spend for the route creation won’t get lost, it is also possible for them to save the route for later use.

Design Challenge