II. Research
We began by recruiting users for interviews. Specifically, we were looking for individuals that rode two-wheeled, motorized vehicles on a regular basis. The preference was for those who were part of a larger biker group, though given the fact that our user base was already fairly small, we also took into consideration those who would usually ride alone.
When our initial pool of potential users was exhausted (including Max attending a biker hangout in Malibu, CA, where he was able to gather several interviews), we made the same questions available as an online survey and posted the link to social media, along with a plea for responses from those we were interested in hearing from.
Getting down into the trenches: Some of our interviewees in their natural habitat.
Very early on, it was determined that motorcycle riders would be interested not just in the social aspect of a potential product, but also in any safety features that could be added. We began thinking of ideas for a physical device at this time, and also included questions in the survey regarding riders’ perceptions of the safety of riding a motorcycle.
While this was all going on, we also came up with a name for our product. That name? BROTHR.
Max came up with the product name. The "Better Riding On The Road" tagline? That's my baby!
Another early step in the research process was performing C&C Analysis that covered a variety of potential competitors and how they handled at least one of three aspects of the product we were looking to build: planning a trip, documenting a trip, and safety features. The various products out there were usually simple enough to use, but never really detailed or fully featured enough for what we were trying to do.
Top: Documenting a Trip. Bottom-left: Planning a Trip. Bottom-right: Safety Features.
Top: Planning a trip. Middle: Documenting a trip. Bottom: Safety features.
Satisfied with the quantity and quality of the user interviews we were able to get (and marching ever closer to our impending deadline), Max and I moved on to affinity mapping in order to categorize and find trends among our respondents. This is what we ended up with:
That's a lot of Post-its...Especially
when half of them wouldn't
stick to the wall for more than a few seconds at a time.
Our users' wants, needs, hopes, and fears now plastered all over a wall and a nearby desk, Max and I began to define and prioritize features.
A Feature Prioritization Chart which helped narrow down the list of features for this first iteration.
Next, we created a Persona. I believe that having a persona to design for is not only useful to guide the process of designing a product, but is also a fun exercise that will ultimately help to empathize with the people that could potentially use our product. With all of that being said, I led the process of creating a Persona whose story we would tell when speaking about our product:
Some key takeaways from the user interviews that are, in some way, reflected in the persona itself:
- Pretty much across the board, motorcycle riders love the feeling of freedom they get when riding their bikes down the road, compared to driving a car. One user in particular likened driving a car to being stuck in a cage.
- For one reason or another, only about half of the users we interviewed belonged to a formalized group of bikers. However, the social aspect of riding was an important point called out specifically in the project brief. Therefore, we knew that we had to design for both types of users.
- Users were surprisingly split on the dangers of riding a motorcycle. There were even a few that argued that driving a car is at least as dangerous as riding a motorcycle. Even so, they acknowledged that additional safety features would be valuable.
- Another point that was pretty consistent across the board was that users rarely (if ever) used an app or social media as part of their riding activities.
I loved the idea of creating a journey map to describe what the current process of going on a motorcycle trip might look like, from the initial planning phase through to documentation (uploading photos/videos, etc.). Max thought it would be worthwhile to create two such journey maps: One to tell the story of a trip that Mad Dog and his fellow bikers take to the Hollister Independence Rally in Northern California, and another one that shows the trip back, with BROTHR in tow.
Here's the first one:
And here it is in the form of a user flow diagram. Note the constant worse-case scenarios this poor guy runs into:
Don't worry, we'll get to the second journey map/user flow diagram shortly.
But first: The last step we took before diving headfirst into the design was to perform a design studio activity between the two of us to sketch out ideas for the most important screens. This allowed us to put all of our ideas together into low-fidelity sketches and work through potential user flows at the same time. These are the results:
Note the profile, GPS, and marketplace pages, as well as the emergency ping pop-up on the left.
IV. Design
Check out these hand-drawn sketches Max made:
Includes a home page, a trip/event page, a profile page, a marketplace, and a settings page.
But wait, there's more!
Remember that we were also planning on designing a physical device as part of this solution? This is what the initial sketches looked like. Let's go over the major features now:
- A cradle that attaches to the handlebars of a motorcycle and holds the phone in a position that would be easy to view while riding.
- Bluetooth integration, which can be used to communicate with riders if they are wearing a compatible helmet.
- A minimalistic interface on the screen to minimize distractions while riding.
- A grand total of two buttons: A Power button on the left, and an Option button on the right which would switch the display between a small number of available screens. This would make it simple to use even while wearing gloves, a concern brought up during user interviews.
- A protective screen that can be brought down to cover the phone in case of inclement weather (another important item brought to our attention during user interviews).
- A remote with a single button, which can be used to contact emergency services and other nearby bikers in case the rider is physically unable to reach their phone after an accident.
Our main features defined, I got to work on that second journey map and user flow diagram I mentioned earlier. The idea was that Mad Dog and the other members of his group met with a vendor at Hollister that told them about BROTHR and sold them the device. The members of the biker group also downloaded the app. This is the second half of their story:
And now that we had sketches and a well-defined user flow/scenario, it was time to start thinking about visual design. We both gathered motorcycle images and images of bikers, as well as images that were meant to convey the feeling we hoped to imbue when bikers used our app:
Finally, we were getting close to a finalized product! But there was still one more hurdle to overcome: We put our hi-fidelity screens in front of everybody else at the school and solicited anonymous feedback. And boy, did we get a lot of feedback...Here are some of the trends we saw in the responses:
- People were generally very impressed with the colors and other visual features, though there were some questions surrounding word choice and iconography.
- This iteration of the application did not have strong Harley-Davidson branding; while the color scheme was reminiscent of Harley, the absence of a clearly visible logo caused confusion.
- This early iteration of the app was seen as being extremely feature-rich. Some users reported feeling overwhelmed when looking at all the information on the board.
And now, at long last, we were able to link everything together and create a clickable prototype through InVision. We were also able to incorporate some of the simpler suggestions into the prototype.
