PUBLIC Bikes
UX Design to Squash Mis-Conceptions About Electric Bikes
Project Overview
Our client--PUBLIC Bikes--is having a hard time eliciting interest in, and selling electric bikes on their website. PUBLIC put a lot of research and testing into these new bikes and knows that there's a lot of potential, but are having a hard time.
In this conceptual project, our design team did a lot of market research about the perception of e-bikes, and re-assessed the brand personality of PUBLIC in order to increase access to, and value of, information on e-bikes on their website as well as develop a tool to assist people in finding the right bike to meet their needs.
Team + Duration
3 person UX design team, 2 weeks from project brief to working prototype
Tools
Methods
Sketch3, InVision, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, pen and paper
Comparative & Competitive Analysis, User Research & Surveys, Diagramming, User Flows, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Project Management
The Problem
People are not sufficiently informed about what exactly an Electric bike is— therefore PUBLIC bikes is having a hard time selling themWhat is an e-bike? An electric bicycle, also known as an e-bike, is a bicycle with an integrated electric motor which can be used for propulsion. There are a great variety of e-bikes available worldwide, all, however, retain the ability to be pedalled by the rider and are therefore not electric motorcycles.
Through interviews and surveys we found that most people have no idea what an electric bike is and how it works. We asked if people would be interested in buying and e-bike or not, and if not, why — the most common answers we received were along the lines of, “I like having to put out the effort to ride my bike” and, “It misses the point of exercise.” These responses showed us that people perceive e-bikes as completely self-pedaling all the time, rather than being a traditional bike with the optional pedal-assist at one’s disposal.
Our Solution
PUBLIC's website wasn't lacking in information about e-bikes, it just wasn't featured prominently enough on the site. Contextual inquiry also revealed that the information provided was increasingly dense and not very fun to read through for most people. So we strategized on how to make the content more accessible and enticing for people to read, and found in usability testing that people prefer mixed media content, especially when faced with a great amount of information.
By offering statistics, video features, testimonials, and fun facts about e-bikes, we could easily increase engagement and interest. We could also maintain ongoing exposure to this information by taking a spoon-feeding approach on the site instead of just housing the "about e-bikes" content all on one page.
Our Process
One approach that worked well on this project was simply to translate the very obvious and specific brand personality that PUBLIC Bikes has in their brick and mortar storefront, to their website to give consumers purchasing confidence. Most people we interviewed who had been to a PUBLIC Bikes store location were surprised when we showed them PUBLIC's current website. The general feedback was that it was too busy and confusing and didn't have any of the personal touch and "hipster" vibes that the store does.
Our first change to the site was the addition of a "Learn About E-Bikes" tab to the global navigation which explicitly addressed the issue of people being unable to shop for an e-bike because they didn't know what an e-bike was. To supplement this we also added several "Learn More" buttons on product pages and made users select either an "electric bike" or "traditional bike" category after clicking on the "buy a bike" tab from the Homepage. A/B testing validated our design decision when users were tasked with learning about e-bikes on PUBLIC's existing website, then again with our re-design.
The next step in our strategy was to design a "help me find a bike" feature to guide people in making informed decisions when looking for the right bike. Our survey results revealed that brand personality and confidence in the products a company sells were critical components in peoples purchasing decisions when potentially spending thousands of dollars on a bike. In addition to imbuing PUBLIC's website with the feel of their store, we created the "help me find a bike" feature to reflect their confidence and excitement about helping their customers.
After taking a trip to the store ourselves and test-riding an e-bike, we could directly empathize with what we’d heard from people in our user interviews and had a solid direction in which to take our design. The first part of our design strategy was to re-design the information architecture of the site. PUBLIC Bikes has a robust amount of information on e-bikes, it just lurks in infrequently visited parts of the site, and simply usability testing of the current site against our prototype confirmed this.
Results & Reflections
What really worked on this project was the re-design of the information architecture of hte site and bringing the PUBLIC brand and experience from their store to their website. Our strategy wasn't to re-build PUBLIC's site from the ground up--instead it was to re-evaluate their existing content and present it in a way that people found engaging and could emotionally connect with.
For this project, we initially started with two different personas--the non-biker (newbie), and the commuter-biker (expert)--and ended up really focusing our design strategy around the non-biker user flow. We were finding that people we interviewed who were cyclist commuters were less interested in e-bikes and so because of the limited time frame of the project, focused our efforts on the newbies. It would be fun to revisit that user group and see what specific problems exist for them.
Next Steps
This project was fun because it was conceptual and was executed in a very short amount of time. However, that also meant that we weren't able to actually flush out some of the restraints we were designing within, and certainly led to some biased design decisions. I'd love to talk with PUBLIC Bikes to see how relevant this theoretical problem surrounding e-bikes is, and walk through some of our solutions to see what actual client feedback might look like.
It's important as a designer to know what you know and execute it well, and this project illustrated how important it is to also know what you don't know, and have curiosity and take initiative to hone your craft as you go.
