A leading audio electronics company wanted to explore the near future of transportation. We began this project with what was initially set up as a comprehensive 2-month long phase of generative research. We were tasked with exploring the present and near future of transportation across multiple domains and identify if there were opportunities for our client to develop new products that would satisfy changing user demands across three modes of transportation; rideshare, carshare, and micro-mobility. For these first three months of generative research, I worked with four colleagues, all of us in taking a product strategist role.

Starting from foundational research, with an interim goal of presenting opportunity areas for client alignment, we conducted business research (including facilitating discussions with potential partners), user and immersive research (nearly 100 interviews and diary studies), and technical research.

To help us with participant screening and research planning we established the following four customer segments. Our team worked in parallel across these three different domains. My focus was on our research into micromobility users.

We conducted Immersive Research activities in Toronto and San Francisco that allowed us to experience the process of participating in the different mobility options, understanding the logistics, making observations, and informally speaking with other drivers and riders.

Our team used a framework to consistently collect our observations using Google Forms, and documented our personal experiences with photos and videos. These activities enabled us to further empathize with participant experiences and will help provide context during ideation and concept development.

We received over 800 applications to participate in our study and we hand-selected 57 participants based on our screener criteria. 47 of these participants completed the 5 part mission that required them to review their mobility experiences, reflect on what is important to them, and contemplate the future of mobility.

We conducted 28 in-person interviews with shared mobility participants that represented our target segments from Toronto and San Francisco. The purpose of these 1:1 interviews was to investigate the unique perspectives of each participant as they relate to our predefined experience themes of focus.

Each interview was conducted with a pair of researchers in a space that we hosted. The interviewer was responsible for leading the conversation loosely structured around discussion guides tailored to each customer segment. The notetaker was responsible for documenting observations in a tool called Reframer and flagging any compelling quotes and related insights. The interviews were also recorded using both audio and video.

To understand the potential business viability within these spaces, we structured our project to include a significant portion of business research. This included industry research and trend analysis across various sectors of the mobility industry, stakeholder interviews with leaders across four of our client's verticals, and subject matter expert interviews with leaders within Uber, Ford X and Turo.

We divided our business research across these domains between myself and another teammate. My focus was on gaining an understanding of the growing micromobility market, including personally owned micromobility vehicles in addition to bikeshare and scootershare systems. The term ‘micromobility’ refers to a wide range of small, lightweight vehicles that travel at speeds below 30 km/h.

We did a systematic literature review of studies, markets and growth reports and incorporated these into conservative market forecasts. By 2030, we estimated that the base case market potential might be worth $316B to $525B. The growth rate of the market and its size were both important factors in assessing business viability for our client.

To help us collaborate together in our synthesis, we compiled all of our findings into a database. We utilized Reframer, which is a note-taking software that allows for the collection of data and collaborative analysis with metadata, to manage session information and collaboratively collect observations.

Working within the value proposition framework our team synthesized our research findings into customer profiles for each of our customer segments, with our customer's highest priority pains, gains and jobs articulated as “how might we” Opportunity Areas. We do this to help us avoid our own biases and ensure our project team is making customer-centred decisions.

As well as our customer profiles we also expanded and documented our research into the behaviours and customer needs within each of the three domains.

We used our customer profiles and research insights to create “how might we” questions that frame opportunities and challenges that we had uncovered, these questions offer us a collaborative and optimistic prompt to spur our ideation.

Across the domains of rideshare, carshare and micromobility we identified 7 opportunity areas that we presented and workshopped with our stakeholders.

After two months of market research, user interviews, diary studies, and technical research, we were able to gain a deeper understanding of our three domains of mobility and the needs of riders and drivers.

Through this generative and convergent process we were able to identify an emerging opportunity space that was previously unknown to our client; micromobility. Just as importantly, we recommended that our client should not pursue further investments into the rideshare or carshare space at this time.

Our client asked us to move forward, extending the project into a new phase of four weeks of divergent exploration, convergent evaluation, prioritization and concept maturation. After which we would reach another milestone when our final concepts would be shared.

I planned and facilitated a team workshop with several rapid ideation exercises that helped us generate hundreds of ideas in both of our opportunity areas. I took these initial concepts and evaluated and refined them into 15 distinct and developed product concepts, after evaluating these with our team and stakeholders, we converged on 2 product concepts that we felt had the greatest promise of being desirable to customers and also viable for our client from a business perspective.

I worked with my team to further evaluate the concepts against a rubric that weighed each concept for product risks of viability, usability, feasibility and desirability.

We converged on two concepts and spent a week developing the ideas further for a shareout with our stakeholders. We also developed our understanding of the potential market size and business value for both concepts so we could contextualize the potential market opportunity.

To help our team, as well as our client, empathize with micromobility riders I created customer journies that would help bring our customer profiles, and concepts to life and ground our value proposition in the needs of micromobility riders.

Katie Alissor is a young urban professional who has moved to NYC to pursue her career.

She's given up on owning a car because of the rising costs of living in a major city, the traffic congestion, and the hassle of finding parking.

Since the switch, she’s also grown tired of the crowding on public transit, the unpredictable expense of rideshare and the fact that she still ends up in traffic.

She’s decided to join the global trend of urban commuters switching to cycling as their main form of transit. She enjoys the freedom, the exercise, the cost savings, and the social aspects of cycling.

However, she finds the chaos of heavy traffic, fear for her safety, and inability to use the navigation tools she’s grown accustomed to using to be both frustrating and challenging.

Katie’s city has an established and growing network of dedicated bike lanes, but sometimes they just aren't where she needs to go, and planning her journeys and navigating while cycling is something she struggles with.

From our research, we were aware that our client's direct or indirect customer in this space may also be a service provider (eg. in shared systems) an OEM, or a municipal government, all three of which their own unique needs. These systems were seen as disruptive, often introducing new challenges and pressures on cities, leading to contentious relationships between regulators, policymakers and service providers. It’s in this conflict that I identified an opportunity to create value and increase desirability and viability if we create value in these different customer segments' highest priority and overlapping needs.

In my research, it was common for me to find headlines like these. Service providers, particularly shared electric scooter systems, are creating new problems for cities, and subsequently are being regulated or banned outright. The problems of the city, become the problems of the service provider as strict regulation may make these new transportation models untenable.

Cities are struggling to keep up with the influx of dockless bikes and scooters. They are frustrated by safety concerns, inadequate infrastructure & poor utilization of existing lanes as well as discarded vehicles adding clutter to the streetscape.

At the same time, policymakers understand that shared micromobility services have many positive benefits including increased ridership of mass transit, improvements to public health, reduced carbon emissions, reduced traffic congestion and financial savings for individuals.

To help us understand potential new rider interactions we ideated on what new hardware configurations might be beneficial. I created some illustrations to bring to life what these different configurations might look like.

Keeping in mind the importance of keeping riders' eyes on the road we felt the integration of a multimodal voice-first interface, tactile and gesture-based touch input, along with haptic feedback would all support the type of safe interactions our customers required.