Agile improvement of PayByPhone App
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24. Juni 2018
Agile improvement of PayByPhone
PayByPhone is an app to buy digital parking tickets. You're going to be notified on your app or your watch before the parking time expires and you can prolong your parking time underway.
The challenge
Improvement of a small widget that is often (mis-)used to start a new parking session.
My role
As UX Designer working in an agile team we strove to continuously improve the experience of the PayByPhone app in two-week-sprints.
UNDERSTANDING
There is an issue. Somewhere.
With checking our app reviews and regular exchange meetings with our customer support we've learned that there is a potential issue for some user when starting a new parking session. Every month there where new cases of people who not only parked in a wrong parking zone.
They accidentally payed for a parking ticket in another city.
Research
We quickly found out that the potential issue must be on the bottom part of the UI as soon as the user opens the map screen on the app.
Context
Every time a user opens the app to pay for his parking there is a widget at the bottom displaying the previous parking session. With just one tap on the button "Pay" he or she can buy another ticket at the same location - no matter where he or she currently is. This is extremely useful for people who always use the service at only one particular parking spot all the time.
Having this in mind we've learned that - obviously - there are some users who might not understand or misuse that widget, tap the pay-button and get fined by the enforcement, because they payed for parking in another city.
Check analytics data: How do user start parking sessions in the app?
Most of our users use one of three methods to get to parking ticket:
- Tap on the parking zone on the map that matches their current location ("map_click")
- Tap on a button that appears if a user is inside a parking zone ("map_current parking")
- Tap on the button "pay" that appears after the parking time has expired ("last_parking").
This event seems to cause issues.
Insight
Our "last_parking" event, that seems to cause issues, is the most used method in order to start a new parking session.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
"Although most parking tickets that are bought with PayByPhone are started with a button that appears once a previously started session is over, it confuses some of our users. This issue leads to unexpected errors and a bad user experience."
HYPOTHESIS
"Redesigning this widget giving more information about the previous parking session will reduce the number of negative app store reviews and support tickets without affecting the number of overall park transactions."
REDESIGN
What did we change?
- Date of the previous parking session added in order to communicate the expiration.
- Changed wording on the button from "Pay" to "Park there again" to make sure the user understands that this would start a new parking session on previous location
- Increased button size
- Increased address font size
- Add an option to close the whole widget
EVALUATION
We released the redesigned version in our iOS app only and checked analytics again to confirm or disprove the hypothesis.
Amount of total transactions remain growing
Our redesign didn't affect the total amount of parking tickets that have been bought with the new version compared to the old version. Which was a very positive result since the number of successful transaction is one of the most important KPI that should grow over time.
How do users start parking sessions in the app - now?
Looking at those graphs we can find interesting indicators:
- More users did start their parking session with the method "map_current_parking" (up to 87% more compared to the previous month)
- Last parking widget (purple line): With the release more users tend to use other methods to start a parking session in the app.
Which could mean that they now understand better what this widget is supposed to do.
RESULTS
Our hypothesis has been confirmed.
With the new version being live in the app store we saw some great effects.
- The number of support tickets about this topic has been reduced. Although there are still minor issues remaining.
- We didn't loose total parking transactions with the redesign.
The first step of improvement has been taken.
