Redesign of a Cargobike Sharing App

To improve its product offering, Avocargo, a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) cargo bike sharing service, planned to switch from its Wunder Mobility white-label app to an in-house developed app. The beta testing of their app revealed usability issues that resulted in an increased number of customer service calls for beta test users. We were hired to address the identified issues with an improved app design.

To solve the problem, we first wanted to better understand Avocargos' customers and how they used the product, so we conducted a Jobs to be Done analysis with the client and interviewed the customer care team. I then conducted a detailed heuristic evaluation of the app to identify usability issues.

We identified two key areas of the application that needed improvement: The main screen of the app with its rental modal was cluttered and the rental flow lacked proper help in case something didn't work as planned. I completely redesigned the main screen, highlighting what was important and deprioritising what wasn't. For the rental flow, I introduced additional help modals to provide more guidance when locking and unlocking the bike.

Read the case details if you want to dive deeper into this project.

As we were not only consulting the client in the redesign phase of the beta app, but were also asked for our input on how to build a more customer-centric business, we conducted a Job to be Done analysis as the first step of the project. The findings also helped us understand the Avocargos service better and made it easier to conduct the subsequent interviews with the customer care team. The interviews then gave us a good first understanding of what the common problems were for the beta app users.

As a third step I conducted a in depth heuristic evaluation of the current version of the beta app along the following six criteria: 


One of the main problems with the design of the apps was the cluttered rental modal on the main screen. Poorly positioned elements and a lack of hierarchy made it difficult to navigate and resulted in a bad glanceability.

With better prioritisation of features and the introduction of chips for quick access to promotions and help functions, the new version of the modal has not only improved glanceability, it's also freed up screen real estate for the underlying map.

A central change of the rental modal was the introduction of the rental state indicator on top of the modal. While the light blue Pre-Rental state displays the costs of a selected rental bike, the green active rental and the yellow paused rental states show the rental time.

First time users tend to not be familiar with the horseshoe lock and spokes of the wheel sometimes get into the way while trying to lock the bike.
 To adress this issue new help modals help modals in the according steps of the rental process were introduced to provide simple instructions via short videos and text on how to unlock and lock the bike.

The resources available to the client's development team were limited, so we had to work with the client's product manager to prioritise the identified issues in a way that would have the greatest impact on minimising customer support calls and creating a better user experience, while keeping development costs low.

As part of a better guidance I analysed and improved the UX Writing of the app, as the implementations of these changes could be done on the spot and would already have a big impact on usability.