This Week-Long 2018 design challenge given to me by the Verizon 5g Innovation teams focused on a design prompt that ask me to redesign the service blueprint of a fictional company called Smartbike. Smartbike focused on bike and scooter share rentals.
I started the challenge by inferring the results of a preliminary meeting with Smartbike to specify goals for the company.
My next step was to do market and business research by analyzing the state of the bike/scooter share industry, which at the time was quickly emerging in urban spaces.
Following my research that grounded me with a foundation about the industry, I proceeded to get on the ground and talk to the users actually employing these services. I also used the service myself as both a user and gig employee to charge them.
A Large survey effort conducted on Reddit allowed me to get more generalized information about sentiments and widespread problems with e-scooter and e-bike share services like Bird and Lime
Based on my background research, interviews, immersive ethnography and surveys I was able to put together an as-is customer journey of the customers for SmartBike using the current scooter/bike services.
From the research and analysis of the touchpoints on the customer journey, insights can be gathered and then converted into design recommendation about how the experience can be bettered.
Taking these design recommendations, it was now time to start thinking divergently again in order to generate creative solutions to the problems facing users. Gamestorming is a great way to do this.
Using a method known as idea smashing, 5 creative ideas involving 5G, the identified design recommendations, and other emerging technologies and business strategies were generated.
The ideas were then ranks on a prioritization grid to determine which were more viable and effective for bettering SmartBikes product and service offering.
To help understand and visualize the role of these solutions and work though how they could be be implemented in the customer journey, a storyboard was completed using the best 3 ideas from the ideation session based on the prioritization grid.
Once the story was perfected, a new customer journey could be created, using the new ideas that solved the user experience issues at the critical touch points in the journey.
A service blueprint was also completed to show how such innovation could be implement in the new service design for SmartBike.
I proposed a post evaluation method that involved using the six thinking hats.