Q-Bike
Shared bicycle services for Australian university students to reduce the pressure of transportation costs.
Team Member
David Liu
Bige Wang
My Role
UX research
Interview
Project Time
3 months
Tools
Miro
Canva
What is Q-Bike?
Q-Bike is a kind of shared bike.
Q-bike provides users with cost-effective, flexible, and eco-friendly short-distance travel services, making low-carbon travel gradually become a lifestyle. By increasing the Q-bike coverage and parking spots, Q-bike effectively addresses the pain points of short-distance trips and becomes an effective complement to public transport.
Design Brief
According to the latest data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2023), there was a 6.8% increase in the monthly CPI indicator in February. The cost of living is continuously increasing, and recent graduates are among the groups that are greatly affected by inflation. They are currently experiencing a transition from being a student to a working professional. Some are still searching for jobs, while others have found a job but are only earning entry-level wages.
This research plan will focus on the existing transportation issues, with the aim of reducing the cost of short-distance travel. As a daily necessity, transportation has an impact on users' efficiency and travel costs. Also, transportation is closely related to the sustainable development of energy.
Q-Bike Concept
Perfect membership system
The membership system we provide has weekly and monthly, which is very flexible to adjust according to the daily needs of users to avoid wasting money. We offer options of $9.9 per week and $29.9 per month, and then up to 15 times per week free for the first 30 minutes, members can also enjoy free unlocking fees.
Increase the number of shared bicycles and parking spots
Increase the number of shared bicycles and set up fixed parking spots to increase the convenience of borrowing and returning bicycles. Not only compared with other large-scale public transportation, but also compared with the existing shared bike platform, it can highlight the advantages of Qbike - high flexibility. It is easy to check the location and quantity of bicycles, and users do not need to worry about where to return bicycles, which improves the entire riding experience and achieves the effect of borrowing and returning at any time.
Attractive discount system
The fare discount of the Opal card is attractive to our target users. So, we took the fare discount system of the Opal card as the basis and made some improvements. For example, regular users will be charged $1 for every 15min of riding, when they ride a shared bicycle over 6 times in one week, their rate will be half price for the rest of that week. Integrate the concept of shared bicycles into the daily transportation habits of our target users, and make shared bicycles a mode of transportation that target users can often consider choosing.
Free temporary parking for 15 minutes
We provide a 15-minute free temporary parking service for each ride. If the user needs to temporarily stop during the ride (e.g., just go somewhere to submit a document or have an important phone call during the ride), there is no need to worry that the bike may be borrowed by others.
How Q-Bike Works ?
Design Approach and Process
Discover
When we designed questions for the structured interview, we misunderstood the role of questionnaires and interviews at this design stage, which should have helped us find the problems or complaints of the target users. Therefore, we spent more time redesigning the question list, removing all questions that involved solutions and making the questions more focused on finding out what cost-of-living pressure respondents faced or how they felt about current transport costs. We conducted Coding, Theming and Sorting of the data obtained from the re-interview, and finally created Personas that were in line with the problems we researched.
Define
We performed multiple times of problem iterations in order to reach the real user needs. We defined problem spaces for our personas, then we iteratively refined the user need statement to get a more complete user requirement. The concept of iteration is very inspiring to us. It can be used not only to discover user requirements, but also to apply to various fields, such as development, modeling, and so on.
After iterating out the problems faced by users and their needs, we compared them with our initial assumptions. We found that our assumptions were too idealistic and subjective. We thought that the vast majority of new graduates were facing significant transport cost pressures, but in fact, only half of the respondents stated that they were under such pressure. The other half believed that compared to economic pressure, they valued time efficiency or flexibility and punctuality in their short-distance travel.
Develop
We discussed the target user’s needs and decided to reduce their cost of short-distance travel by improving the current shared-bike industry. We hope to reduce the cost of using shared bicycles, collaborate with NSW Transport to support Opal Card, and improve the current shortcomings of the shared bike industry to encourage target users to choose shared bikes instead of buses or taxis, thereby reducing the cost of their short-distance travel. Therefore, we chose to use an experience prototype to represent our solution.
We set up ten scenarios for the target users, which describe a specific user experience: users make choices in commuting time and cost for different modes of transport, and finally choose to ride shared bicycles to their destination because this mode of transport is short in time and low in price.
Deliver
Based on the evaluation from testers, overall, in our proposed solution, only by improving the current drawbacks of shared bicycles, such as adding storage baskets and supporting credit card contact payment, can we attract users to use shared bicycles and to some extent change their high priced travel habits. We need to iterate the current experience prototype and refine the way to reduce the price of shared bikes, so that our proposed solution is sustainable in the financial area.
The reason why our solution is too vague and idealised may be that during the development process, we gradually deviated from the human-centred design concept. We may unintentionally add our own thoughts and perspectives during the steps of developing solutions. These impacts are gradually accumulated during the development process, leading to obvious feasibility issues in our final solution or deviating from the user centred design goals.
Future Plan
The purpose of the Q-bike program is to integrate bike-sharing into users' daily travel habits and make Q-bike a popular choice for short-distance transportation. We will enhance the user experience by focusing on aspects such as convenience of use, cost-effectiveness, and safety. To make Q-bike more convenient for users, we plan to expand the coverage of bikes and parking spots. Once the number of Q-bike users reaches a certain level, we can collaborate with NSW Transport to make the Opal card one of the payment methods of Q-bike, and join the discounted plan where users can enjoy half-price fares after accumulating 8 rides. In addition, we will negotiate with NSW Transport to add bike lanes. As a flexible and cost-effective way of short-distance travel, Q-bike can serve as a supplement to public transportation.
