The morning was spent in getting to know one another and discussing house rules and class expectations.
After lunch, Emily gave us a brief introduction to User Experience, after which we were sent out in groups of four to redesign one aspect of either the MTA or Citibike user experience. I am slightly obsessed with Citibike and nudged my group towards picking this for our project. We sat and observed and ultimately honed in on something Elle mentioned, which I had never even thought about, as an annual member.
She had purchased a day membership once and described the experience as follows - once you pay for the membership, you receive a slip of paper with a five or six digit code, and go to any of the docks to enter the code.
She experienced one major problem with this process:
The keypad (consisting of the numbers 1, 2, and 3, which I hadn’t even realized were for this purpose because they were so subtle) next to the slot for the card/dongle for annual members - the buttons were merely a circle printed on the surface with tiny raised dots in the center of each circle. They were so minimal it was hard to tell whether they had been pressed hard enough to register in the system.
It was easy to get into a situation where one thought he/she had pressed the button but hadn’t, or vice versa, that one thought he/she had pressed a button only once but had entered it multiple times.
That, coupled with the fact that one was only given a few tries before the code became invalid, led to a frustrating experience.
We thought about different solutions to the first issue.
One option we discussed were LED buttons, that lit up (more like the iPhone home screen when one has to enter the passcode), with a display that showed you how many digits you had entered. However, we also realized that these could be costly and also easliy susceptible to vandalism and damage.
We discussed how more substantial buttons, like the metal buttons on the now pretty much obsolete pay phones, would be an improvement, so that users could more easily tell when they had pressed the button, with the added benefit of the sense of satisfaction people (or maybe just us!) get when we press those buttons. These could have lights behind the numbers that lit up when pressed.
We also discussed adding lights next to the buttons that lit up when the buttons were pressed, another way the user could receive feedback that they had correctly entered a digit.
If the LED panels were too expensive, we discussed having lower cost display panels that displayed how many digits had been entered.
Ultimately, our team agreed that better feedback (i.e. the user more immediately discovering whether or not the buttons had been sufficiently pressed) would lead to a more efficient and less frustrating user experience.
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