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CITY CYCLES

UX Design Case Study

City Cycles is a bike rental shop that was having challenges with its online reservation system. In this case study, you will explore the steps I took from research to prototyping/testing to shipping this solution.

Image by Sudo

INTRODUCTION

As part of my Skillcrush UX class, I was tasked with improving the online reservation experience for an existing website for a client named, City Cycles. City Cycles is a popular bike rental shop based in a highly dense downtown area. City Cycles discovered they had a broken online reservation process, which often led to incomplete online reservation requests. As a result, users would have to call in or show up in person to complete their bike rental reservations. City Cycles recognized being inundated with phone calls and in-person pop-ups wasn't an efficient way to serve all their customers in a timely fashion. I was hired to improve the website reservation UX, making the booking process legible and simple for users to feel confident about booking online, thus increasing the number of complete online bike reservations.

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THE PROBLEM

The client’s existing website looked like this (see image above):
Users were complaining that the site was “frustrating” to use and they felt “misled.”

MY ROLE

I was tasked with: 

  1. Ideating solutions for the users’ problem or pain point

  2. Mapping out user flows and journeys

  3. Collecting user data and conducting user interviews

  4. Prototyping the City Cycles website

  5. Facilitating usability testing 

Image by Felipe Furtado

MY APPROACH

My approach to this UX project started by taking the following steps: 

  1. Empathizing with City Cycle users: I needed to gather as much intel from users to understand their pain points and challenges to rent a bike online.

  2. Defining the problem: From the data collection, I needed to distill what the root cause was as to why users abandon the existing online reservation system. 

  3. Ideating solutions: Based on the research and defining the problem, I collaborated with other UX colleagues and stakeholders to explore all possible solutions before narrowing down what ideas to move forward with to potentially solve this problem. 

KEY FINDINGS

After performing research, collecting data, and analyzing the results, this is what I found:

  1. Most customers rent bikes at the top of the year; things begin to decline in May.

  2. Most customers rent bikes because it’s easier to navigate downtown and avoid the heavy commute to work/school.

  3. Most customers liked the City Cycles website design and layout. 

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SOLUTIONS

After ideating some potential solutions to the users’ problems and pain points,

I decided to move forward with the following idea: 

  1. Adding a “Book now” service navigation button and adding “book now” buttons under the featured products. 

  2. User data indicated that many felt “mislead” with how to make an online bike reservation. By adding these buttons, this gives users a clear and confident way to go about renting a bike online.

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Screenshots of my Lo-Fi prototype and my interactive, digital prototype

Based on my paper prototype, I created a high-fidelity, interactive digital prototype of my proposed solution. After performing a usability test on my prototype, I received the following feedback: The users felt they had more than one-way book a bike online. The users shared their thoughts about the overall look and feel of the website; found it to be difficult to read. I took their feedback and made some adjustments to the button colors and font uniformity, so the site looks more legible to read and see.  
Based upon the results of my usability test, I proposed the following next step(s): I recommended launching the prototype as user testing and data validated that adding these buttons improved users' ability to book a bike on their own.

LESSONS LEARNED

The biggest challenge or obstacle I faced during this UX project 

was: collecting data and distilling the best solution that will meet 

the immediate need of City Cycles users. I received lots of detailed 

feedback from users, which didn’t always align with the current scope 

of this project but I still found the information useful to capture in case

City Cycles stakeholders wanted to prioritize future enhancements.  

The lesson I learned from this UX project included: getting 

feedback regularly in the process makes it easier and more 

efficient to deliver a timely solution.

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