By Alex Mays

Problem Statement

City Cycles wants to increase the number of users booking bicycle reservations through their existing website. Users currently prefer to book via phone or in person.

About City Cycles

I was tasked with improving the user experience of an existing website for a client named City Cycles. City Cycles is a bicycle reservation service, with the ultimate goal of increasing bike rentals on its online platform. They discovered their online reservation process was inefficient, requiring users to phone call or book in person instead of using the online method. This led to worse customer service at City Cycles locations by the influx of phone calls and a decline in returning customers to the City Cycles website. I was hired to improve the website’s UX, making the reservation process more user-friendly for City Cycles and their customers, thus increasing the number of bike reservations.

The existing website

Research

Key Takeaways

Users are looking for a more simplified and easy-to-use website to make their reservations. Users are interested in biking to explore the city and reduce their carbon footprint.
Users want to see photos of the bikes available to rent and want a clear way to book for a specific time.
The users liked the visual aspect of the website but not the functionality. Users also seemed to give up after finding the make a reservation link.

User Persona

SWOT Analysis

Screen-Shot-2022-01-03-at-1.48.47-PM

Interviews and Surveys

Meet Ash

Ash is a City Cycles user we interviewed. To help understand the problems users are currently facing when trying to rent bikes online, let’s look at Ash’s story:

Ash needs to rent a bike because he moved to Riverside recently but he didn’t bring his bicycle. The shipping was really expensive to move his bike so he wanted to rent a bike from somewhere local.

But it’s hard for Ash to rent a bike online because he tried to use the online form once before but didn’t like it. Ash felt the information was missing, the process was confusing, and it unexpectedly opened his email. This makes Ash feel very misled.

Solutions

After ideating some potential solutions to the users’ problems and pain points, I decided to move forward with the following idea:

The solutions that I came up with were to include photos of our available bikes, make the reservation process three clicks to complete, add a time selection feature for reserving a bike, and finally, make more of a clear reservation button. I changed the website by simplifying each page and creating a more straightforward reservation process. I put a bike selection feature with titles and prices displayed. I made the bike pick-up location clear. I put a time selection feature for users to know what time to pick up and drop off their bikes.

I created a high-fidelity, interactive digital prototype of my proposed solution. After performing a usability test on my prototype, I received the following feedback:
Users couldn’t find the pick-up location and wanted more information on bikes

Based upon the results of my usability test:
I added titles, a clear location on the main page, and pick-up locations on reservation pages. I user-tested once again and users were happy with the final website.

Sitemap

User Flow

Prototypes

Low Fidelity

High Fidelity

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