Moving a city
Company
Motivate, operators of CIti Bike
Timeline
2014
Role
Product Designer
Team members
One other product designer
The challenge
Citi Bike is a public bicycle sharing system in New York City. Visitors and New Yorkers can get memberships or one-time rides through an app or physical bike dock kiosks. As a central source of information about the system throughout the city, the kiosks are a vital entry point for new riders.
My approach
Design a universal how-to guide for the Citi Bike system.
The impact
The final design was installed on 330+ kiosks throughout New York City. Our work was featured in The New York Times Magazine.
The results
increase in ridership amongst one-time users
Old and wordy vs. new and illustrative
Listening to all customers - People from all over the world move through New York City. The Citi Bike system is meant to serve all of them that are able to ride a bike, regardless of the language they speak. Yet the original design was only in English. We therefore identified the informational panel as a high impact and low effort intervention to improve Citi Bike's user experience.
Ride alongs - We continually spoke to, observed, and interviewed customers taking out a bike for the first time. They had difficulty at every stage of the process so it was clear that the panel needed to be completely redesigned. Constant iteration and testing identified how to build a better information architecture through clearly delineating steps and improved legibility with an illustrated visual design language.
Deploying to a city
Our design transformed large blocks of text into universal illustrated directions and a streamlined pricing table representing a complete bike rental process. Our final iteration led to the quickest rental process with the least questions asked in 92% of our tests.