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class. Human-centered Design & Innovation
project. Final Project - Improve Biking in NYC
team. Abhinaya Shankar, Venika Anand, Sarthak Arora, Josephine Choe
role. Concept, Research, Prototyping
date. May 18 to June 10, 2021
rove: A Personal NYC Expert
Summary
Problem
Guided bike tours are a great way to see iconic attractions and feel the heart of the city. The fresh air and exercise are wonderful compliments to the learning experience. However, you may not like the schedule constraints, expensive price, and the tourist group feel of the Guided Tours.
Along with this, exploring without any assistance may leave you lost in an area that is unfriendly to bike. Or it may take you somewhere fascinating, but you will have no way of learning more.
Solution
The solution is rove. Rove will be your personal NYC expert and will bring route guidance and NYC knowledge safely to your ear.
The rove experience is designed for you and begins with your choice of a popular tour route, a customized tour route, or to just rove.
The popular tour route could be anything from a famous scenic route of the Brooklyn Bridge to a sponsored experience featuring New York legend Jerry Seinfeild.
A customized tour route and audio experience can be specially designed around your desired locations, difficulty level, and interests.
The audio experience can be customized to any route because all of our stories, facts, recommendations, and endless amounts of information are pinned to specific locations around the city.
Because of this, many of our riders take on the true rove spirit and choose to bike their own path, but then gain interesting insights and knowledge about whatever location they happen to pass.
Rove is a private, on-demand tour guide experience that is customized to fit your needs. If you don’t have a phone mount, just leave your phone in your pocket as bike specific voice navigation can be given right to your ear.
Also, you can easily turn myGuide on and off as you need, but don’t worry about repeating a tour because rove will remember and is constantly updating, ensuring that no ride will ever be the same.
Now with rove on your phone, it is time to get outside and explore this incredible city.
Design Process
Our assignment was broad as we were tasked to simply...
"Improve the experience of biking in NYC"
To do this, we conducted primary and secondary research about the NYC biking experience that led us to our goal, which is to bring everyone the authentic NYC biking experience. This led us to three ideas which we prototyped and tested with potential users, resulting in the continuation of our idea for a virtual tour guide. Through further ideation, we developed rove, a personal NYC expert that can take users on a customized audio experience throughout the city.
Territory and Opportunity Area
From our NYCbike forum analysis, our own Journey Map experience, and our ethnographic interview, we had a better understanding of the pain points associated with biking in New York City. We saw that a significant amount of reddit/NYCbike conversations were about others coming to the forum asking for route suggestions and also had our own pain points we had to personally overcome as new riders. This led us to connect with the territory of people who wanted to explore NYC with more confidence, the confidence of a NYC biking expert who knew the best biking routes and scenes to see.
Problem Statement
Our ethnographic research then gave further insights into the motivation and experience behind those who want to experience and explore NYC, which led us to our problem statement.
Ideation
With the user insights gathered from the lead user NYCbike research, our Journey Map reflections, and our ethnographic interview, we ideated three possible solutions to our problem statement.
Prototyping
At this point in our design process, we liked all of our ideas equally and needed to prototype each so that we could test them with potential users and move forward with the best. We first began the prototyping process with rough user flow journey maps for each. This then led to the low fidelity prototypes we created in Figma.
Testing
In order to decide which of these ideas was best to move forward with, we created a google form that walked users through each prototype and compared them. The results added key insights that allowed us to move forward with the Virtual Tour Guide.
The honest critical feedback was helpful in eliminating ideas. For Idea 2, we learned that people visiting and new bikers do not really need special bikes and current NYC cyclists do not have spare bikes or weren’t excited about lending them out. For Idea 3, we learned that our route sharing community platform is not different enough from current products like Strava and AllTrails to excite the community. With this, we received quality feedback that helped us further ideate the Virtual Tour Guide. For instance, people liked the free ride feature, but were confused by the name and thought it meant that it didn’t cost money. We also had others excited about the idea and suggested an interest they wanted included in the tours, this being ‘best restaurants’.
We created higher fidelity user-flow prototypes in Figma for further testing and ideating.
Framing and Reframing
As we continued to ideate our Virtual Tour Guide app, we had a lot of exciting ideas that we kept working through as we thought of the best way of implementing a virtual tour guide service. Along with working to stay anchored to our original problem statement, “Potential NYC bikers are intimidated by NYC biking stereotypes and unaware of the authentic and enjoyable experiences NYC offers”, we wanted to think back to the specific users who led us to this idea. In other words, we focused on those who want the information and security of a guided bike tour, but do not want the scheduling constraints, cost, and tourist feel of the guided tours. So, we listened to our users and continued ideating.
Safety was a major concern so we thought through the current practices of bike users who ride with music or podcasts. We understood that using two headphones could be unsafe when biking in a city and a speaker may be hard to hear or too awkward with others around. This led us to the feature on the app that requires users to use only ONE headphone. This will even feel natural as many audio tours at museums offer only one headphone. With one headphone, rove users will be able to experience the content, while also being safely aware of their surroundings. With an emphasis on safety, we will also add key reminders on traffic rules before every ride. We also provide a button and vocal commands like “pause” and “continue” for anytime the myGuide experience needs to be paused to safely focus. The voice navigation will continue and is specially designed with bike specific turn warnings and guidance. Along with our best practice safety plan in place, we will have users sign our terms and agreement policy that protects us as users will use rove at their own risk.
In testing, our users showed great interest in the “free ride” feature, but we needed to change the name which led to the word “rove”, which means “to travel constantly without a fixed destination; wander”. We worked through and tested other names like joyRide and BikeBud, but believed “rove” best fit our adventurous and explorative mission, as well as had great branding and logo opportunities. When you remove the “r” in rove the logo, you see a bike.
For the customized tour route part of the rove app, we had to understand what matters the most to the user when choosing their route difficulty as we wanted to design the best experience in using the app. We wanted our app to find a route for everyone from a seasoned cycler to a first timer. The choice between time duration and mileage limit allows users to dictate the length of the ride experience in the way that fits their goal. With this, we worked to simplify and generalize the difficulty ranking of routes to its most important factor, as well as make it the most programmable for our algorithm. So we found that bike lane preference is the key differentiator. This is why “easy” will generate routes that are strict to bike lanes and bike trails in parks, “medium” will prioritize bike lanes but will open the rider to ride with traffic if necessary, and then “hard” allows rove to generate the route with no bike lane restriction.
Our Solution
The home screen allows for the user to select a pre-existing tour route that is popular in your current location or the location you search. These can include tours of famous landmarks or can be content driven by specific sponsors.
If the user is not interested in the prescribed tours available, rove is named after it’s “just rove” feature that allows users to freely bike wherever they please for as long as they please. Whether it is an open ended adventure or a typical commute, myGuide will generate an audio experience that fits the user’s interests and the locations they pass. The content could include stories, fun facts, and recommendations and will play constantly throughout the ride.
The “Customized Tour Route” feature provides not only an interesting tour experience, but also a bike route that fits the user’s experience and fitness goals. It will auto-fill the user’s current location for start and finish as it will assume a loop route is desired, but this can be easily changed to fit the navigation they need. With this, rove will also ask if the user has any key landmarks like a monument, park, waterfront, or a restaurant already in mind. If so, rove will take the user on a route that includes these landmarks, but if not, no problem and rove will have the freedom to provide a route that best fits their difficulty and interests. When selecting route difficulty, the user will add a time or mileage limit, and then choose a difficulty based on their bike lane preference. Interests will then be selected from the user’s current list of recent interests, and a custom tour route and audio experience will be generated to fit their needs.
Implementing
Solution
Technology
Rove is centered around the technology that each fun fact, story, and recommendation in the database is pinned to specific locations. So when the user picks from the list of their frequent interests, the myGuide algorithm will then provide an audio tour experience based on whatever location the user happens to pass when exploring.
In the custom route generation situation followed in the video and prototype above, a route through central park was generated and the interests tagged were architecture, cinema, and art history. With the user allowing rove to track their current location on the bike, rove will know when they are approaching a pin like Pin ab23kio23309. A multitude of facts and stories will be linked with this pin so that when the user passes it, the algorithm will generate the audio for the facts that fit the user's interests and share those in a timely order that best fits the ride. If the user was just “roving” and happened to pass by this pin with the same interests, the same audio would be played. However, if the user happens to bike by this area again with the same interests, a different audio experience would be given as rove will remember what you have already listened to and is constantly updating. This may mean that it will provide more detail on the same subject or a focus on other information at nearby pins.
Business Concerns
We plan to offer a free day pass to get users first trying out rove. This will get new users and especially tourists exploring the city and hooked on our virtual tour experience. After one day free of rove, we will charge a $4.99 day pass which is targeted at tourists who may be visiting for more than a few days. As we target tourists, we will look to partner with CityPass and offer rove services to those who travel with CityPass. However, for our local and consistent users, we will offer a $14.99 monthly subscription that gives them unlimited access to tours, custom routes, and roving. This is about equivalent to what audible charges ($14.95) and spotify charges ($9.99) per month. However, more research will need to go into how often people ride with rove to determine the best pricing structure.
We will also generate revenue through sponsored content that works seamlessly with the audio tour experience. For instance, when biking through Central Park and near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in central park, the MET can pay us to have a pinned fact that may share information about a new exhibit opening up and the hours of the museum. The same sponsored content model can be used for comedy clubs, restaurants, theatre productions, and a variety of community events. It could even consist of celebrity voices exploring with users and showing them their favorite parts of NYC.
Beyond the sponsored content, we will need a massive amount of research done on New York City in order to provide the experience we promise. A significant amount of money will need to be raised in order to fund the research of NYC and that is something we do not want to cut corners on as the content of our experience is crucial to having consistent users. We plan to have our own research team focused on curating, editing, and fact checking, but would seek out all the great museums, libraries, and historical societies in the area as partners in bringing their masses of information to the most ears. These key partnerships will help cut the cost and therefore the initial funding requirements needed to start rove. We will also make an effort to work with local bikers as they are the experts at experiencing the city on bikes.
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