Design a customer application for a bike sharing business

1. To further clarify the question, I would like to know which problem statement are we actually solving –
   1. Bike pooling app – Bike with 2 seating capacity where the owner/driver can offer the vacant seat to a rider
   2. Bike renting app (AirBnb of bike) – Bike can be shared/rented to people by the owner
2. Do we need a mobile or desktop application?

I will try to answer both the above mentioned problem statement. In an interview you can ask the interviewer before moving forward with the solution. Assumption is we will build mobile app as desktop won’t be convenient for these use cases.

Bike Pooling App

For the initial design, I am assuming that the driver of the scooter is the owner as this would reduce complexity in design. Also, I believe we are not focusing on monetization for the business as of now. However, I will address the payment issues between driver and rider.

Now that we know about the business, I will come up with user segments. I will then find their needs, build user stories, create solutions and evaluate them to create an MVP.

User Segments & Personas

There are 3 user segments for our application

1. Driver
2. Rider
3. Customer Support

I will focus on driver because if we cannot get the driver on-boarded the other two won’t matter. Uber also did the same while launching – focused on on-boarding drivers.

Since we are focusing on driver, we can first define their persona. Mostly, the driver will be a person around 18-35 years of age looking for extra cash. He will be comfortable in riding with a stranger. The reason for age chosen being the assumption that above 35 years of age, people would be earning enough to not rely on the additional cash coming from pooling. Also, senior citizens might be looking for cash but they will not be comfortable to ride with strangers. There would be some outliers but we can ignore them for now.

User Stories

Few of the needs of drivers would be

1. Finding and confirming rider
2. Deciding a pickup point
3. Estimated fare
4. Payment and ride completion confirmation
5. Security
6. Hygiene

Since we are focusing on MVP, I will look at the most needed features which are 1, 3, and 4. So my user stories as an owner are

• Find riders and send them a confirmation so that I can start my ride
• I want to know the fare I will get so that I can decide whether it is meaningful for me or not
• A way to tell the system that I completed the ride and will be paid so that I can drive without any hesitation

MVP

Usually I would pick one of the user stories and build MVP. But for this case all 3 are important to build a MVP.

Solution to User Story 1 (US1):

1. Display the list of interested riders near the driver’s location.
2. Provide capability to the driver to find the rider using their username
3. A matching algorithm to find the rider who wants to go in driver’s direction

Solution to US2:

1. Option for driver to send the fare to rider
2. Fare estimation based on
   1. Distance
   2. Fuel cost
   3. Time consumed
   4. Past data for similar drops

Solution to US3:

1. Ride completion notification to be sent from rider
2. Auto tracking using GPS co-ordinates of both driver and owner
3. Auto deduct money from rider’s wallet/bank. Provide a daily settlement into driver’s account

I will evaluate solutions in each story on customer impact and ease of implementation. After the evaluation, I will select 1 in US1, 2 in US2, 1 and 3 in US3 for the MVP.

Bike Renting App

I will assume that we are creating an app for users to rent their bikes.

User Segments & Personas

We’ll have 2 main user types:

• Lender: owner of one or multiple scooters who is willing to lend them with specific conditions. Reasons for lending could be to gain additional income with convenience.

• Borrower: a person who’s seeking to borrow a scooter for a certain period.
  • Scooters enthusiast: experiencing new and unique scooter models without the need of large investment or long term commitment of buying a scooter.
  • Tourist: a person who wants a convenient, relatively cheap, and fun way of transportation within their period of stay in a city.
  • College Students or employees: seeks a relatively cheap, safe and convenient way of transportation without the need of doing quite active, sweating movements as in cycling. They might be looking for an extended period of borrowing.

User Stories

Again, my focus would be on lender. The critical lender needs will be –

1. List my bike/s with a picture, textual details, and available lending times
2. A medium for communication with the borrower
3. A reliable payment solution to receive the payment for the service

Now, I will focus on the user stories for building my MVP. The most important features would be 1 and 3.

MVP

Solution to US1:

1. Lender can list their bikes on app by taking photos.
2. Lenders can provide the price for borrowing per day and the location for pick up and drop-off.
3. Borrower gets to find scooters by showing them all listed scooters with description and picture.

Solution to US3:

1. Lender specifies daily rate and borrower pays with cash once they see.
2. Lender specifies daily rate and borrower pays online post the drop.

I will evaluate solutions in each story on customer impact and ease of implementation. After the evaluation, I will select 1, 2 in US1, 1 in US3 for MVP.

Design a web search engine for children below 14 years of age

To further understand the question I would ask few clarifying questions –

1. When we say web search engine, I would assume that we are talking about something similar to Google/Bing.
2. Which platform will we launch this search engine? Mobile/Desktop/Tablet? This can be answered once we have more details on ur target segment.
3. Since below 14 yrs represent a huge segment, I would assume that we will be targeting children between 10-14 yrs of age. As below 10 yrs age children might be too small to use the product.

Now I would like to understand what problem are we trying to solve, what will differentiate our product with that of existing products in market? I will assume that current product is not that user friendly for our target group and does not specifically cater to their needs.

Target Segment

Firstly, I would figure out for whom we are building the product for:

1. Children in age group of 10 -14 years, I will assume they can use existing product (Google/Bing search engine) in the market. The understanding and knowledge level of will vary, I will assume our target group is a regular school going kid who understands basic level of English.
2. Parents who would use the search engine to find information related to kid’s education, their careers etc.
3. Teachers who would like to use search engine to teach kids. They can also give references from search results to kids.

Now that we have identified the target segment, I will try to address the question of platform. Since smartphone penetration has increased tremendously I will design the web search for mobile.

User Behaviour

Post the target identification, I will try to understand the user behaviour. What product features should be built to cater to those.

1. Children in age group of 10 -14 years
   1. Current product in the market assumes that person has basic comprehending capability. But children in age of 10-14 years are still in basic schooling phase. Hence, they lack ability to go through several results and decide which ones are the most suitable.
   2. They might not clearly articulate what they are looking for
   3. Short attention/focus duration
   4. Visual content is more appealing
   5. Susceptible to hacking
2. Parents
   1. Would not want their kids to waste too much time on it
   2. Want to ensure that there is no malicious content displayed
   3. If possible, monitor the activity of kid on search engine
3. Teachers
   1. Would want to recommend links to their students/parents
   2. Would want to search for latest development on the topic going on in class

Product Features

Now that we have understood the needs of our users, I would like to list down our product features. For this I will try to come up with basic features based on above needs and prfioritize the features. For the feature set, I will focus on the children as they are our primary users.

1. Use profile (age, country, city, school, interests) of user to return more relevant results.
2. Recommendations from teachers and friends shown first.
3. An AI based mechanism to understand the intent of the search instead of matching the words for searching.
4. When hovering mouse over the link summary of the article to be explained – It can be either in form of text or voice.
5. Crawler filter – This search engine should only be crawling sites that are age appropriate. One way this can be done is from the information itself. Another way is from looking at the demographics of the users that go to the site itself. It’ll need to ignore any domain that doesn’t fit the children under 14 demographic or that has content that is inappropriate or may be abusive.
6. Social connect – This would allow children to connect their social accounts of choice. This would give them the ability to see what sites their friends have visited on the default search page.

These features can then be prioritised based on their complexity and importance.

Design an app for touring a city in an offline mode?

Focus Persona/user – someone who is a tourist and visiting a city for short term. 
This user group has a few unique needs:

– They are short in time and would like to see the most interesting places (based on their level of interests) in the city
– They eat out every day
– They want to experience new things in the city
– They don’t have easy access to the internet and would appreciate finding places that offer free internet (Starbucks)
– They want to get public transport information
– They don’t have a lot of information about various neighbourhood 

There should be two modes – 

Planing Mode (which should be part of online mode when user is connected to internet) and Offline – transition mode (where user is out exploring the city).

Now, let’s focus on needs listed above –

1. Limitation in time –> Allow users to change the tour path while being in offline mode. They might decide that one place is more interesting than they originally anticipated and would like to spend more time. Allow them to adjust their path as they go through the touring experience
2. They eat out every meals and need to find the right places to eat –>
a) Present recommendations on the restaurants at the time of tour planning (online/planning mode)
b) Load list of restaurants, reviews, menu that are close to the tour path. Allow user to change their decision and view details about other restaurants in their path. (the recommendations are saved on the planned path)
3. They want to experience new things in the city –>;This will be a standard functionality that a touring app will have. Ask for their interests and use data collected to make recommendations on the route. The recommendations could be based on user generated votes.
4. They don’t have easy access to the internet and would appreciate finding places that offer free internet (Starbucks)–>;
a) During the planning phase, ask user if they want internet during the day. If they do, load list of places with free internet into the offline mode.
b) Allow user to either search for internet hubs in the offline mode and show places with free internet.
5. They don’t have a lot of information about the unique attributes of each neighborhood. Render such information into the planing/offline mode of the app. Also, while planning show the unique attributes of the areas user want to explore.

This is just a small list of features that would enable offline touring. But they can help build a MVP. If I also wanted to prioritize the solutions above, my criteria for the prioritzation would have been customer impact (how big of a problem is it solving), and cost (how easy is it to build this?). Here are my assessments of the features –

1. Medium, high
2.
a) High, low
b) Medium, high
3. High (must have), medium
4.
a. High, low
b. Medium, high
5. Medium, low

Features 1, 2b, 4b have a lot of commonalities in implementation. They all rely on potentially integrating with other services to pull the information from them and need ability to search locally on the phone. 

In the list above, I would prioritize 2a, 3, 4a as my first priorities, then 5 as my second priority and 1, 2b and 4b as my third priorities.