VIDEOPROTOTYPE – GROUP 4

After successfully conducting our user research and refining our ideas and insights we settled for an app idea called “WeCommuters”. The following video prototype illustrates its usage.

WHAT IS IT?

Our concept is a quick and easy way to connect with other commuters. The general idea here is to find people and socialize while simultaneously being sustainable. As an incentive for users to frequently commute with others, rather than using their own car, we also added an extensive rewarding system.

How does it work?

After registering and entering your information, such as your starting point and the destination of your daily commute, you land on the home screen where you can already see other commuters that have a similar way to their destination. From here you can contact them with our built-in chat function and create groups to organize your daily commute together. That’s basically it! Our aim was to keep it as simple and quick as possible. As a bonus and incentive to reduce the amount of cars on the roads, WeCommuters also includes a rewarding system: After commuting with others, you earn points (the amount is dependent on the distance) which you can later redeem for different kinds of rewards (for example coupons or gift cards).

Benefits

We are aware that similar kinds of services already exist. But in difference to these services our ultimate focus was to create a way for commuters to socialize and make friends, while also giving them a platform to organize themselves into carpools, having the environmental aspect in mind. We think that especially in post covid times this is super important. 

Next Steps

One further step to improve our service could be a better way to verify users to create a safer and more secure environment. Another point would be finding a way to finance the rewarding system. For this we would need to conduct additional research to find out whether users would rather like to see advertisements or pay for the app (for example a subscription based model or a one time payment).

Concept – Group 4

After conducting our interviews and generating multiple different insights we were able to come up with a multitude of ideas. Our next step was to create storyboards, which are a simple and straightforward way to further elaborate and visualize the problems we are trying to tackle with our product. For this process we picked two of our best ideas and split up into three groups, with each one creating a different storyboard.

Our first idea was to create a social network service targeted specifically to commuters. With this service commuters would be able to communicate with each other and easily carpool to their destination while being sustainable and social.

Our second idea revolves around the concept of incentivizing users to make use of more ecologically friendly means of transportation. For this, the user would be rewarded with different kinds of goodies (for example coupons or even money) whenever they decide to use alternative means of transportation instead of their car.

After having a discussion on which idea was the best for us, we decided to continue working with our first idea. Our next step is to create a video prototype. Stay tuned!

User Research – Group 4

Daniel Niggemann, a S-Bahn driver from Munich (on the left) and Ludwig Degenhardt, member of Group 4 (on the right)

The society has now been affected by the Covid 19 pandemic for almost 1.5 years. This also had an impact on the mobility sector. Our team decided to interview five different companies, like for example a suburban train driver from the MVG or the car sharing association StadtTeilAuto from Freising. Our aim was to get a good overview of the mobility sector and collect lots of information.

We were especially interested in the challenges the companies faced during the pandemic and how they were able to overcome them. Another important question we posed was how these measures have affected the customer’s user experience.

We also specifically asked about the user group: “commuters”. A lot of people worked at home or avoided public transport due to the risk of an infection. Therefore, the decreased usage of some mobility services has been a problem for some companies. In the next step, our team will focus on evaluating the data to develop a concept for a better customer experience in the post-covid time to come.