Ironhack Project 1: Buy a ticket online
For the first Ironhack’s team project, we needed to work on the interface of the underground ticket machine.
First step: Interview
To collect data, we conducted guerilla interviews in the underground. We asked people buying ticker questions such as: Do you use those machines often? What do you want to buy? Did you succeed?
We interviewed 14 persons wanting to buy a ticket and one RATP worker.
Those interviews helped us find the difficulties of our users.
Second step: Pain points
First, we did a task analysis: buying a one-trip ticket to go inside of Paris. This task analysis helped us define clearly our pain points.
Pain points :
- Limited choice for languages (German, English, Espanol, Italian)
- French chosen by default, but not written clearly
- Numerous different ticket
- Full-price ticket and half-price ticket without any explanation
- Don’t know when to pay or where to look while paying (the machine or the payment machine).
Once our pain points are defined, we could think about solving them. But first, we needed to decide for whom we were solving those problems.
Third step: Persona and User journey.
Based on who we interviewed, we did a persona: Camille. She is a 30-year-old woman living near Paris that doesn’t take public transportation often.
But now she has a meeting in Paris, so she needs to buy a ticket to take the underground.
We created her user journey to illustrate her pain points :
Representing the feeling of Camille during her journey helped us find design opportunities to focus on :
- Language: the machine is by default in French, but as it is unclear, she felt the need to choose a language and choose English
- Ticket choice: there are so many different tickets with an unclear name that she is unsure which one to choose.
- Payment: she is not sure when to start paying, and she tries to click on “Pay by cash”, but nothing happens, so she’s not sure when to start paying.
Fourth step: Brainstorming
Based on those design opportunities, we proposed ideas to facilitate our user’s journey.
Some steps were pretty fast, like choosing a quantity, and some were longer like ticket choice.
Fifth step: Prototyping
Each one of us got three screens to redesign based on our brainstorming. We also needed to film a video of us interacting with our prototype.
I filmed the context, going to the underground and then my three screens, and my teammates also filmed their three screens. And one of my teammates did the final editing of the video.
Our prototype was a lo-fi prototype made with paper and pen.
To solve the language problem we added french as one of the choices:
As Paris is a very touristic place, and as it as been confirmed as a problem by a RATP worker we also decided to add 5 languages (Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Russian).
Even though the French is not selected by default anymore, there is no more click, you just need to aim for the french flag now.
To solve the number of different tickets we simplify their names and add icons :
The different tickets can be divided into two groups: tickets to go inside Paris and tickets to go outside of Paris.
We also keep some frequently bought tickets, such as tickets to Disneyland or an airport.
To solve the payment problem, we add a screen in which you should choose between card and cash :
It seemed to us that it was a natural reflex to click on the payment’s method before paying, as you do this in (most) self-serve checkout.
More design opportunities
While brainstorming, we also thought of other problematics and decided to modify these.
It was hard to choose between full-price and half-price tickets as there was no explanation, so we add an “Information” buttons that open a popup to see all of the different persons that could use a half-price ticket.
For the quantity screen, we add a drop-menu to make it easier and less crowded while keeping the total.
At the recapitulative screen, we also add a drop-menu to add a last-minute ticket.
Sixth step: Presentation and Conclusion
As our first project at Ironhack, even though it was challenging with the lack of time, I liked it. And I loved the fact that right after the course, we got to do it and to experience it.
