The sharing economy is ever-growing, and it is exciting to be at the forefront of this movement and live in the city where ideas can thrive and turn into products within a matter of months. One of these products is emmy - an electric scooter sharing service. What started as an idea in a park turned into a prototype within a year and is now a fleet of over 1’600 scooters and 150’000 customers. Amidst their takeover of the German market, emmy approached us after a Product Crunch event, our monthly event series for the Product Design Community. Their product was going very well, and after deciding to invest in design, they were ready to go the extra mile - literally.

As automotive lovers and avid emmy users ourselves, we were excited to partner up with an established startup team and work alongside them on their first connected product. Almost everyone in our office has cruised around on one of the bright orange GDR Schwalbe remakes, which are often strategically parked in front of our Kreuzberg entrance, ready for the next lunch mission.

The challenge of creating a companion app Up until that point, emmy had been using a white label solution for their app. This solution was great to help them with a quick jump start, however, the bigger they became, the more important it was to focus on their distinctive individual attributes and build a product uniquely for them and their users' needs. 

After an initial kick-off workshop with the emmy team, we defined a key challenge for us to approach: “How might we simplify the rental process and create an onboarding experience around emotional needs with a seamless migration of user into the product?” It was essential for us to bear in mind that the companion app was really just a companion and that the interactions with it should be as minimal as possible. emmy is about the scooter, and the app should make the scooter-use as efficient and enjoyable as possible.

Our goal was to use emmy’s winter break to kick start our partnership and combine the powers of a UI/UX sparring team from Goodpatch and the in-depth technical and product knowledge of the emmy team. Together we would take a ride through the design process to ensure a market-ready product for the Summer season. Sometimes we worked at their office, sometimes they worked at ours, and you’d often see a convoy of orange scooters around Tempelhof or Kreuzberg off to grab food whilst using and building the next version of their app.

We started with the problem phase and analysed the current product and its usability issues together with the emmy team who had already collected valuable insights and knew what their users’ pain points were and support to make these insights actionable.

In the solution phase, we distilled and prioritised all these insights and used them to overhaul the user flow to make the interactions faster and ensure a more reliable experience for the users booking and managing their rides. We created a prototype that could be shown to users and utilized to find out if these assumptions were correct or if there were still aspects we had missed.

In the third phase of development, it was all about taking these new designs and delivering them to the development team to create a minimum lovable product: a beautiful product a small group of users love. With handovers tools and precise alignment, we could seamlessly share design assets with the developers to implement into the beta version of the app.

Throughout the entire design process and each phase, we needed to put our initial assumptions as well as polished designs to the test. We used a mix of methods and measures to get these insights and focused on both qualitative and quantitative testing. 

During the qualitative testing, we were able to experience firsthand the emotional value of the product. emmy users aren’t just commuters wanting to get from A to B. They are fans who use the red scooters to zip around town, explore the city and want the usage of the app to be just a simple and carefree as their Berlin-lifestyle. Never before have we gotten so many user testing sign-ups and word spread around town like wildfire that you could get 500 free emmy-minutes. 

We set up a fully equipped user testing room where we could interview users is the most non-invasive way possible, while still allowing the team to hear what was going on in the room next door with shared screens and microphones. We try to share these user insights with as many members of the team as possible so they can see how users react to their products and understand what needs to be changed. Emmy showed their true user-centricity and genuine interest in their community by being a central part of this phase, including a visit from their CEO Valerian.

Users feedback is critical, but the effort to prepare and run user tests takes time and money, which is not always on the table. We additionally performed quick and dirty tests throughout the process to validate design decisions and always strive to make easy decisions as quickly as possible. 

A more quantitative method we used was with our VR prototyping tool Athena. We recreated the iconic emmy Scooter and could thus not only simulate the interaction with the app but also the interaction with the scooter and combination of the two products. More and more products are becoming complex systems with a hardware and software mix, and it is essential to be able to test these complete scenarios is an early, low-cost project phase.

A recurring problem for users who don’t use emmy often is the process of unlocking the scooter, opening the helmet box and using the kickstand - an important set of tasks that take routine. Our challenge was to make this as easy to understand as possible which we did by creating an onboarding experience that helped show the single steps and guide users through the complete experience.

However, once this clear onboarding experience was established, we had to make sure we catered to both FTUs (first-time users) and heavy users. The heavy or frequent users don’t need to see all the steps each time. With a skip function, this could be solved. Two additional functions made it possible to skip the introduction entirely if the app was used multiple times a day for three consecutive days, but also the insertion of an information button to show the steps again - say for users that come back after a bit of a break.

We quickly realised that in addition to the challenge of combining hardware and software there was a third component that is very crucial: the support service. Until our collaboration all scooter problems were reported via mail and phone call, resulting in more work for the emmy team. A seemingly small change for the user, but a big step for the emmy team was to include a damage report function in the app. This made the user’s experience less of a hassle and channeled the support issues for emmy.

A last small, but vital change for the users is that in the old app the detail page of a scooter (showing the battery levels and address) opened in a new page, now all this information remains in the same screen allowing the user to keep the overview of the map and check the scooter.

After a successful partnership, emmy will be launching the beta version of the app this Summer. Their team continues to grow, and the design team will grow with it. They will continue to use an iterative design process to add new features and keep listening to their users to create the best scooter sharing service in Germany. Emmy shows a great example of how far you can get with a user community of fans and how valuable it is to listen to their feedback, understand it and implement it into practical design solutions. 

The Team from left to right, Diana Abdu UX, Matthias Flucke UI/UX Illustration and Alexander Venus main UI/UX.