Urban mobility is constantly changing, with increasingly high expectations from the end-user perspective. Websites, applications, online services, digital platforms are multiplying and have the challenge of offering a fluid and successful user experience. Feedback on the user experience and its understanding within Velco.
User Experience or UX: what is it?
UX is a shortcut for “user experience”. UX refers to the quality of the user’s experience in any interaction situation and qualifies the overall experience felt by the user when using an interface or more broadly with any device or service.
It involves the emotional impact felt during the interaction and includes anticipation of use as noted by Donald Norman, an american cognitive psychologist:
“UX is the responses and perceptions of a person resulting from the use or anticipated use of a product, service or system.”
The main objective of UX is to study the behaviour of users in relation to the use of a product in order to improve its ergonomics, facilitate its use and make it more intuitive and as efficient as possible.
UX and Urban mobility
An upheaval is taking shape in our cities. With the rise of UX in recent years, its application has emerged in many new areas. One of the latest is urban planning, or rather UX urban design. It’s opens up new possibilities for the improvement of our cities, both in terms of planning and in terms of mobility within them.
Innovations in urban mobility are for the most part based on user experience innovations linked to digital tools. For example, the multiplication of taxis or carpooling has been made possible thanks to a new support: mobile apps.
In this evolution of urban mobility, two-wheelers have their full place (bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, motorbike…) as means of transport in the city. These new services are developing at breakneck speed and digital technology is revolutionising the user experience. Saving time, peace of mind and safety are just some of the advantages that make it easy to get around in our congested cities. Bike sharing, electric scooters and scooters are taking over the streets of all major cities.
The boss of Uber himself admits it: “The car is no longer adapted to urban mobility”.
It is in this constant evolution of our modes of transport that Velco is a major player in urban mobility.
Work the UX of our B2B services: Velco is committed to co-build with its customers
Today, the user experience is at the heart of Velco’s concerns, in B2B as in a B2B2C approach.
From software, to services for professionals, there is bound to be a way to improve your users’ experience. The majority of recent IT products dedicated to professionals are now very intuitive and ergonomic. This is thanks to the work around the UX of these interfaces. Without this work, the services and technology deployed behind the platforms is not highlighted and cannot seduce your customers and users. To optimize your ROI (return on investment), a UX strategy is essential.
UX: a transverse discipline
As UX is a constantly evolving discipline, it includes the permanent questioning of your existing digital platforms and tools, and implies an agile methodology for your future projects. The user experience is a team effort!
Projects must be collaborative and involve all stakeholders and not only designers, this is the essence of the agile method. Rather than defining all requirements in advance, the agile process allows for regular review of requirements and creates much more effective synergies.
Key Steps in a UX Strategy:
1. Immersion
This first step consists in defining the project (demand, context, objectives, success indicators), identifying the targeted users, selecting the user research activities and the first methods to be mobilized. It is thanks to it that it is possible to understand and define the needs, without which a problem cannot generally be properly addressed.
2. Exploration
Before optimizing UX, you need to understand what visitors expect and how they behave on your site.
In this stage of exploration, it is essential to know the expectations and needs of future users. Make an audit of the existing system, compare your performance with the industry average and study your analytical data. The “field” study allows you to take into account all the stakeholders, by going directly to meet your users.
After discovery, analysis! This step allows us to extract interpretations from the data and transform them into indicators that serve as a basis for designing the first functionalities of the solution to be developed. Archetypes of end-users or “personas” are established that will serve you throughout the development of the project. They describe the different objectives and behaviors observed in the users.
It is by having a good knowledge of your audience’s behavior that you will be able to identify the frictions that slow down your visitors and define points for improvement.
3. Ideation
This step is used to generate ideas.
Brainstormings and ideation workshops are always best done in a group! By taking advantage of everyone’s ideas, new ones can be generated. In the form of workshops, develop and select the most suitable ideas or concepts. Working as a team also helps to involve stakeholders and to get a better buy-in to the project.
It is necessary to think about selecting the elements that must be present in the construction of the interface structure to ensure user satisfaction. An overall vision must be built.
4. Sketch, Analyze, Repeat
This phase focuses on the mock-ups, the concrete element that allows a better understanding of the interaction between the screens and the links in the tree structure. By working iteratively in teams and, if possible, with end users, generating mock-ups and making them interactive (clickable) simulates the future application.
The sooner you test, the better.
Why is the prototype so important? It is the model that is going to be presented to a representative sample of the typical user to get feedback so that the necessary modifications can be made. Unable to determine user needs and experiences with absolute accuracy, the UX designer needs their feedback to perfect the created prototype.
These steps must take place as many times as necessary until users are satisfied.
5. Evaluation
Evaluation is the last, but crucial step, in the UX design process and it’s important that your final product be assessed for quality, compatibility, and user acceptance. This involves testing the solutions with target users, and adjusting the prototypes until the expected level of quality is achieved to deploy the product. It is the iterative evaluation of the generated solutions.
Products are evaluated on a series of questions: is the system useable? Is the experience simple? Is the product flexible and easy to change? Does the experience provide a solution to the end user’s problem? And, most importantly, do people want to use it? If not, what’s wrong?
Here, for example, we are talking about user tests in their work environment, which you can carry out using different methods. The aim is to observe their behavior, to note their reactions, to record their journey through the interface, in order to identify the positive and negative aspects of their experience.
This user-centric approach makes it possible to define the foundations of a new service, or to rethink an existing service. The importance of understanding and adapting to the needs of each client case is paramount. rimordiale.
The UX approach is fundamental in projects where safety issues are paramount. It is crucial to be able to test the product as early as possible in order to eliminate business risks and make navigation as intuitive as possible.
Cities grow. The living space of each individual and the possibilities of mobility in this urban environment must become more efficient, time-saving and, of course, peaceful.
This reality opens up many possibilities for urban mobility actors to improve the daily user experience.