Julie Hobson - UX Portfolio

Opportunity

How can we improve the convenience and security of cycling to our university? As a cyclist, I noticed that the current university bike parking setup is extremely inefficient, forcing cyclists to choose between the security of the covered parking and the convenience of the street. My team agreed with me, so together we endeavored to create a 'smart city' design to address this need.

Process

As a team we worked closely to generate and choose ideas for the design. I performed observations and interviews, designed the existing user journeys, led the construction of the physical prototype, designed the final application, and created the app prototype.

Outcome

BikeBerg, our final design, enables cyclists to secure and collect their bikes with one quick authentication action instead of three! It's a design concept for an underground bike parking solution as well as an accompanying app. We hope that the university considers our design for implementation in the future.

team

Julie Hobson (me)

Nitesh Bali

Rachel Braham

Emily Daskalantonakis

Devisha Modi

OBSERVATIONS

Scoping out the current bike shed situation at the university.

Julie and Emily looking around bike shed

INTERVIEW DATA

Summary of the data collected from our guerilla interviews with cyclists parking at the City University campus.

USER JOURNEYS

From our research, we drafted design goals as a team and I created two existing user journeys, this first one to portray the inconveniences of the current bike parking shed.

user journey 1, showing boy late to class because of number of steps needed to park in current shed

I created this second user journey to show the insecurity of outdoor parking, the other of the two major themes which emerged from our user research.

user journey 1, showing girl having her bike stolen when parking it on the street

concept sketches

My sketches for potential concepts for a smarter bike shed. Many of these ended up in the final design concept.

EXPERIENCE MAP

I created this user flow to convey the intended journey for users with the final design. The final design concept consisted of the following features: a secure place to store bikes and gear underground, heated lockers for wet clothes, changing rooms, community bike tools, and a full-service vending machine with coffee, tea, and bike essentials.

map of intended user flow with new system: steps from planning a bike commute to biking home

DRAFT APPLICATION

As a team, we sketched out navigation and features for an accompanying application for the smart shed.

app prototype

My final high fidelity prototype for the application, designed in Sketch and brought to life using Marvel. I used a design pattern and the Samsung calendar app as the starting point for my visual design and customized from there!

interaction flow

I created this interaction flow diagram to help convey the microinteractions as the user navigates the main parts of the app. I highlight any animations that indicated feedback of where users tapped and rules that govern the app's responses to input. This is one piece of several forms of documentation I can produce to help communicate my design to developers. For an example of an inspectable design handoff deliverable, see my RockStar website project.