Last week we updated our assigner Martijn de Waal about our progress and search of the last couple of weeks for the improvement and adjustment of the bikeability of Amsterdam.
Related work
We investigated four different topics within our project which all relate to each other. Bikeability, smart city development, community engagement and hackable objects. We learned during the documentation of the related works more about the definition and discours of the concepts and the projects that relate to bikeability in which these concepts play a huge role.
Paper prototype
During the prototyping workshop with Tamara, we got inspired to make our own paper prototype in relation to the concepts that we came with up during the workshop with Charlie. The paper prototype we came up with is a ‘Rate your Route’ application. Users are able to rate their route on weather circumstances, busyness and safety by pressing a happy face or a sad face. Routes can also be saved and shared with friends that are also using the app.
Martijn liked the idea of the prototype, but he noticed a few features that we did not include. We won’t work further on this prototype, but it was a fun introduction to (paper) prototyping and thinking about user possibilities.
Field research & personas
The sun was shining, time to go outside! We split up and started interviewing people on the street on their biking experience, biking behavior and biking culture. Their answers were quite surprising. Our focus lied completely on route planning and mapping of experiences, but these first cyclists in Amsterdam that we interviewed are not interested in apps that are related to route planning. We ended up with 17 interviews, which ultimately led to 5 different personas. These personas are all part of the bicycle culture of Amsterdam.
(Click on the image for a larger version)
We wanted to create a visual experience of the personas, so we arranged a map of Amsterdam. We mapped different routes per persona, according to the routes our respondents mapped earlier that week. While discussing the personas, Martijn noticed that we missed three types; the commuter, the immigrant and the long distance cyclist. He thought that these subgroups might be interesting to investigate during our next sprint.
The whole experience brought the project to a new level. Currently we are working on two new prototypes; ideation and issue mapping.