Van Bike is a route-planning app that helps novice bikers plan a safe route in Vancouver according to their experience level. It aims to create a comfortable biking experience, encouraging citizens to bike more to meet the city's goal of sustainability.
This project was an Android App developed with teammate Keith L. Due to the technical limitations, I redesigned the app to create an integrated experience after the project.
The city strives to make transportation more sustainable. The plan includes creating a safe biking experience for the citizens because many people are unwilling to bike due to safety concerns like complex road conditions and heavy traffic.
To begin with, I discussed with the stakeholder, Vancouver CityStudio, to understand their challenges. From this conversation, I learned the biggest obstacle that stops citizens from biking is their lack of experience and guidance.
I decided to narrow the scope down to helping novice bikers since the stakeholders believe these amateur bikers will benefit the most from the guidance of route planning.
To understand why the city needs a dedicated cycling app, I analyzed the most popular route-planning apps for bikers and concluded the results:
1. They don’t provide routes that are tailored for different experience levels.
2. Most lack the road type details, which creates uncertainty when following a route.
Then, I interviewed 3 novice bikers. Since finding participants who matched the demographics was difficult, I did more secondary research by reading articles and blogs from online cycling communities (like Vancouver HUB) to reduce the bias caused by this small sample group.
To lay the foundation, I ideated the key path of route planning and other supplemental features to solve the user pain points, and used this framework to guide the design exploration.
User Flow: Plan a bike route to an unfamiliar place
During the ideation phase, I created wireframes to ideate the workflow of informing users of the road types and general route information.
After searching for the destination, the user can click the “Direct” button to generate the suggested route. Since the user needs a route that fits their comfort level, each route displays a summary of road types, distance, and duration.
The CityStudio documented 6 categories of road types. Some road types are safe (protected bike lanes), while some are dangerous (shared lanes). Therefore, I displayed the road type information in the UI so bikers can select the route based on their comfort level.
To ensure the hazard alarm is current and accurate, the report function allows the bikers to update the hazards they witnessed on the road. After an internal review of the city, other app users can use this information to avoid potential danger.
The interface will display hazard reports on the road of the selected route. Once checked the hazard report, the user can generate new routes by detouring the dangerous roads.
During the usability testing, participants reported concerns with the detouring feature: "If there are multiple incidents on this route, do I need to select the detour function for every incident?"
The testing result indicates the edge case that I neglected when designing. With the feedback, I redesigned the interaction flow to fix the usability issues.
Also, there is user feedback that the color-coding with different shades of blue is not memorable. To reduce the user's cognitive load, I simplified the color-coding: blue for regular road types (shared lanes/unpaved roads) and yellow for the dangerous ones.
