Tier - Battery Swap
Tier is changing micro-mobility industry, offering e-scooters with a swappable and rechargeable battery, used for short-term rentals through their app. Our challenge was to improve the battery swapping experience on the App.
my role
client
Timeframe
What is the Battery Swapping?
New Tier e-scooters are each equipped with a removable battery that can easily be exchanged for free minutes at SwapSpots (a local shop), all around the city. Swapping an old battery for a new one is easy, fast and users can get free minutes.
How Might We?
Tier challenged my teammate and I with this specific task
How Might We educate our riders on what swapping is about through the app?
Tier - Battery Swap
Tier is changing micro-mobility industry, offering e-scooters with a swappable and rechargeable battery, used for short-term rentals through their app. Our challenge was to improve the battery swapping experience on the App.
my role
client
Timeframe
The Feature
What is the Battery Swapping?
New Tier e-scooters are each equipped with a removable battery that can easily be exchanged for free minutes at SwapSpots (a local shop), all around the city. Swapping an old battery for a new one is easy, fast and users can get free minutes.
How Might We?
Tier challenged my teammate and I with this specific task
How Might We educate our riders on what swapping is about through the app?
UX Research
As a team, having a very short timeframe, we decided to jump into the UX research with usability testing, one survey and a competitive analysis.
Our main research goals were to understand how the users interact with the app and the pain points, goals, and needs while using the Battery Swapping feature.
We conducted a total of 6 interviews, already users of the service and not, and thanks to them we were able to collect important insights that we added to the ones the stakeholder already pointed to us.
Insights
Along with my teammate, we also tested the feature and had trouble understanding the way the battery swapping process works, not knowing how to initiate it. The current User Flow is chaotic and not very intuitive. We tried to summarize it in the following graphic.
Research Synthesis
Based on our research, we understood that most of the users were not aware of the feature at all, even if they were interested in getting free minutes. So the HMW we received from the client wasn't accurate enough, and we had to move into something more specific:
How Might We make users aware of battery swapping and its benefits?
Who are we designing for?
Based on the information collected, we could define the type of user to empathize with. Let me introduce you to Georgi, expat in Berlin.
Ideation
With the needs and the insights clear in our mind, we have been able to brainstorm and think about ideas to improve the whole User Flow.
We discussed and voted to select the ideas that could most effectively solve user problems, using the MoSCoW method to prioritize, based on the results we got from our research.
Final designs
Here you can see some of the main edits we made in the final design, compared with the current version of the feature.
1. Filter
2. Swap Battery button
3. SwapSpot: reserve a battery and get directions
4. More information about the Swapping feature
Next Steps & Learnings
As this was the first time we worked on an existing digital product, we had to face the reality of an established design system to follow, and not having as much creative freedom as we had to think about issues like cost and time. We learned how to judge what is performing or not in an App, and how to meaningfully solve those problems that the user is facing. The Tier team has been wonderful and supportive with our work, and if we had more time we would have definitely done more user testing to iterate.
