“People deserve better” — this was our fundamental intention for creating a mobile application for London’s public transport. Our passion for its Victorian roots made us put our hearts to it.

The problem

When my flatmate Daniel and I started our jobs in London we inevitably began traveling by the famous Underground (also known as the Tube). We quickly noticed three, major, daily reoccurring issues:

• The weather and rush hours have an immense impact on service disruptions wasting people’s time and money.
• World’s oldest underground rail opened in 1863 still has only around 30% stations accessible by wheelchair or mobility scooter from street to platform.
• You can easily get stuck underground during your commute due to unexpected engineering works and service changes.

These issues quickly became highly tiresome forcing us even to ditch Tube on our daily commute. However, avoiding a problem doesn’t solve the problem.

Initial research

Many times we’d witnessed others facing problems with Tube travel. So had we. As an outcome we did market research to identify already existing solutions:

• The official TfL website provided answers to the above issues however, there was no mobile app available.
• There also were lots of apps touching upon one or a few of the issues. Although the products were clunky, extraordinarily unintuitive, they didn’t work properly and were visually repulsive.

This was the moment of our very sober realization that people deserve better in regard to their struggles with commuting or when they paid lots of their savings to visit London for a weekend.

The challenge

The initial research proved that the need thereby the market exists. It also proved that the customers within the market had already been educated in terms of existence possible pain relievers.

Such big players as Citymapper focused on a variety of functionalities whereas status, service disruptions, and tube accessibility has been neglected. This proved that we can follow the product strategy of “Enhanced Experiences”, as Vimeo or Twitch does in opposite to YouTube. Our core problem statement:

How could we ease public transport commute and let people for conscious and convenient travel?

MVP

The research helped us identify many opportunities that eventually could take place within the final MVP. For instance, we discovered that one of the features that people looked for the most was Tube map. Thinking of building our Tube app we initially had not planned to deliver such functionality which decisively turned out to be essential.