RIDE @ 2MUNDOS
Creating an app for a pioneer electric scooter rental service
When
Feb 2018 – Jun 2018
Role
Product Designer
Platform
iOS/Android
Introduction
About the company
The ride was the pioneer company to bring to the Brazilian market an electric scooter rental service app. In the future, the company merged with Grin, had the ideal to facilitate urban mobility and give the alternative of less polluting transport to the residents of a giant city like São Paulo. All of this through an app, and that's where my work starts.
My role
I was the main designer for this project. In a lean team between the project manager, front-ends, back-ends, and another designer, I worked closely with the engineers to prototype the app and the CEO to ideate the project. During 2018, I stayed for approximately 5 months at the head of the Ride app - between the idealization, prototyping, approval, and the launch.
Challenge
The objective of this project was to create an app from scratch for a new type of service in the country: the electric scooter rental service.
Besides creating the design for the app and making it as functional as possible for the users, we faced the challenge that we didn't know how to approach this service since we had no competitors and it was a new thing for our consumers. Knowing it was a new experience for them, I had to dig deep into the research to understand what would work for our market.
Process
As we didn't have much information about this field and was a pioneer app in the country, we relied on doing a lot of interviews with users to understand the type of consumer and which audience we would reach, while we meet with the stakeholders to align expectations. We also analyzed a few competitors from other countries to get a bit more information.
With the interview answers and our personas created, we decided which features would be in the MVP, both the essentials for the app and the requirements of the investors of the company, and with this, we started to create all the flowcharts.
Login and scooter reservation flow.
Wireframe of the app - different screens.
One of our challenges was to develop everything quickly, so we did a few low fidelity tests to do usability testing with users, and with the feedback, we did the necessary adjustments. After everything was approved, I designed the app in high fidelity following the design guidelines previously created. For this, I used Sketch and InVision for the interactive prototype.
While we got all flows approved, I designed the visual of the app, although I had to create a few versions until the owner approved the style.
Did you notice that the design of the app is very… blue? This was one of the requirements that we needed to change in the design. After this, I created the style guide for the company.
Illustrations, icons, tokens and a few components that summarize the look of the app.
As I was working a few sprints ahead of the development team, I helped them to understand every feature and also did the design quality assurance when they delivered the sprints.
Also, to assist in the operation, I created the admin for this project, with the management of scooters and users, and dashboards.
Final design
Result
The end result was an absolute success! After the phase of tests, the app was released for the market with more features than initially planned. It was launched in August 2018 in Brazil before any competitor, and the return was positive and higher than expected.
Ride came out a lot in the media, which made the brand give a big boom in the market. Finally, Ride end up merging the company with the Mexico City-based electric scooter company (but I was no longer working on the project).
Photos of the scooters parked or being used by the users
Problems faced during the project
Although the project was a success, the team faced a lot of problems during the execution. Since the scooters were new in Brazil, we had many questions: will the user like it? How to adapt the idea for our market? Our solution was to do countless interviews with the consumers to start the project, and do benchmarking with companies from the United States to get a better sense of what would be the better approach for the project.
Also, I worked for a small startup in a war to be the first company to bring the electric scooter to the country, we had a low budget, high demand, tight deadlines, and a lot of direct interference from the owner and investors. So, we end up skipping a lot of processes that we would like to have done but we tried to do our best to bring the best solution possible with the resources we had.
Conclusion
As it was a new market in Brazil, this was an impactful job for me, even more considering the conditions and the time we had. Was intense, with a lot of demand, not much time, but it was a memorable experience and I'm very proud to be the main designer of this project.
We studied the customers for our market and launched the product before the other companies did, and also, it was incredible to see that others used our product as a reference. After all, it was from Ride that the wave of electric scooters settled in Brazil.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the company.