Rehlati enables PDO staff and contractors to easily book trips, track bus and know when it should arrive, see all past and future bookings and lastly check-in using eTicket generated by the app
PDO
UI Design
Development
Testing & UX
This is a story about the first time we used Design Sprint back in December 2019. We’ll share with you how we set a goal to increase data accuracy and how a Design Sprint helped us achieve this goal. This results in the development of a prototyped, user-friendly app that received positive reviews.
Rehlati app aims to automate passenger movement, monitor fleet utilization, and provide usage visibility. The web and mobile-based application for corporate commuting services provide passenger booking and verification, bus management and monitoring, as well as monitoring of fleet utilization and reporting.
Also, Rehalati allows charging mechanism for all the commuters, tracking and reporting of journey and booking, creating various reports, which provide complete visibility of transportation service such as the utilization of busses on a daily basis and per route, no. of passengers per company, no. of passengers per contract, etc.
Everyone is probably familiar with Design Thinking, a methodology that starts first and foremost from the customer perspective. Design Sprint 1.0 is a five-day process (developed at Google Ventures) for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with target users.
Working together in a sprint, team members can shortcut the endless debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week or more if necessary. It would normally take four to five days to complete this sprint in an actual work situation, but as we’re working with PDO and Al Sumri transportation employees, we’ve squeezed it into four days to allow the employees to focus on their work. Learn more about Design Sprint here.
We worked on Rehlati along with e-mushrif to deliver the app and web application. PhazeRo supplied e-mushrif with product designers to understand customers' need and align it with business goals. Also, the product designer took the overall responsibility for the visual design.
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Now that we’ve outlined the basics of a Design Sprint let’s go a little deeper on how we actually did it.
We spent the first day studying the product by using similar mobile apps and looking through user reviews on Apple’s AppStore and Google’s Playstore. This step gave us an idea of what users are actually looking for when using a bus booking app.
“Ask the Experts” is a learning activity where a team member gets to interview experts from their chosen subject. As our facilitator, Awadh asked each of the team members to describe the product with questions like:
While the experts talked, the rest of the team recorded the “How Might We…” questions using the insights and problems that they have heard.
After having a voting session, we narrowed the HMW questions down to the three most important “How Might We…” questions. Among them were:
Due to privacy, we hid Admin part features and activities.
Importance/Difficulty Matrix is a quad chart for plotting items by relative importance and difficulty. It lies in Understand phase and took around an hour to complete.
The items in the upper left quadrant are high-value because they yield great impact at a low price. The upper right quadrant items are considered strategic because they require large investments to get big results. The lower right quadrant contains luxurious items—costly endeavors with little return. And last but not least, The items that land in the lower left quadrant are characterized as targeted in the next phases. The goal o prioritize a list of items and understand their relevance to your project.
This involved proposed features by the client and us and the new features that came up after HMW’s and expert interviews.
Every application has multiple user paths through it. All these paths are valid. The Golden Path, or the Key Usey Journey as it is also called, is the key set of steps that a user takes to find a product’s real value. This path should be the ideal default and not focus on exceptions or errors.
As a team, we identified the golden path through the product thinking of stories, not the screens needed to accomplish the goal. Also, we highlighted the secondary paths, which are additional alternate path scenarios.
In order to visualize the user flow and see it in a bigger picture, we drew a map with several user groups and important steps: searching, deciding, booking, and traveling to the destination. Then, we listed the steps that fall under each main step as following:
We map out a user’s experience step by step through this activity as they encounter any problem space or interact with the product. Creating a map allowed the team to get into the mindset of the user and illuminates pain points, identifying opportunities to create new or improved user experiences.
We created maps for all personas:
After defining the questions that we were going to solve and collecting enough context about the problem, it's time to sketch the potential solution. Our goal is to brainstorm inspiring solutions as much as possible in a limited time. As a result, we run a ‘Crazy 8’ activity - a fast sketching exercise that engaged people to sketch at most eight ideas in eight minutes. Then, We hanged everyone's sketches up on a wall. Each participant had few minutes (<3 mins) to present their solution briefly. After reviewing HMW questions, each participant had unlimited votes to select the best idea or a specifically most inspiring part in the sketch.
Time for the main event. The Solution Sketch is the culmination of all the work that has gone into the Sprint until this point. This exercise is also known as the 3-Step Concept, where we tape three A4 papers into a vertical panel. Each panel should have a catchy title and be self-explanatory with annotations on the sides since we won’t have the opportunity to explain our thinking to our team.
It is here! The goal of this day is to create a prototype that can validate our solution.
Before creating a digital prototype, the designer sketched it on paper, and it is definitely the easiest and simplest approach to test almost any interaction. While testing the paper prototype, we recorded a list of UI improvements and places where users were most likely to be confused and redesigned the screens.
The goal here is to make a digital prototype as real as possible so that the user testers would feel like they’re using a real product (or as close to one as possible). We used Sketch as the main designing tool and Marvel to generate prototypes. Of course, one day wasn’t enough to complete all screens, so we decided to focus on the main screens for the passengers.
Once we are done with our prototype, we tested the screens with five different users. Why five, you may ask? Well, It’s proven that after three tests with a product, you’ll start seeing very similar answers.
Questions to ask participants:
Things to ensure them before they start:
Task scenario for them to be in the situation:
As a PDO employee, you have been selected to go to Qarn Al Alam for work. It’s not your first time, but what’s new is the app Rehlati that has been used recently to book trips to the interest areas. You downloaded the app and started searching for a bus.
User tasks:
After testing the app:
