LEEZING — Mobility for Münster
This project was carried out as part of the TechLabs “Digital Shaper Program” in Münster (winter term 2020/21).
Abstract
Münster, the cycling capital, has almost 600,000 bicycles per 300,000 inhabitants. Nevertheless, residents are often faced with the problem of not having enough bikes to explore the city by bike, for example when visiting. With Leezing, we want to overcome this problem by creating a sustainable bike-sharing community where people can rent or lease bikes on a short-term or long-term basis.
Imagine your friends come to visit you in Münster and you don’t have enough bikes for all of them. Then you have to show them the cycling capital on foot or by bus. Considering that Münster has almost 600,000 bicycles per 300,000 inhabitants, that’s pretty dull. Why not just see if a neighbor wants to lend out his bike and experience Münster the way it should be experienced? We want to make this possible with Leezing, where you can rent or lease bicycles on a short-term or long-term basis. By the way, it’s also perfect if you’re away for a semester abroad! Register, place an ad for a bike and do good.
It started with our UX design team, Anna and Clara. To better understand the problem and our potential customers, we started with surveys that we sent out to various students. After evaluating them, we quickly realized which criteria are important for a sharing platform and which can be neglected. Based on this, we built different personas to get a better idea of our target group. Along with story scenarios, we were able to see when our product would be used and how the process should work in the best case. After the product idea was almost finalized, we worked with the web developers, Jan and Tyll, to decide which features and functions our website should have and what was feasible. We quickly agreed on the most important functions that could be easily built on later. Then the UX designers continued with making wireframes to get a rough structure of the website. These were directly forwarded to the web developers, who already worked on the basic features, such as a “log-in” procedure. Based on the wireframes, we started to design the website in Figma — always in consultation with the rest of the team and external people. Once the basic features were designed, they were passed on to the web development team, which then started to implement them.
The web development project started with our tracks on udemy, which are part of the TechLabs program. We decided to build our web application using react for our frontend and node.js for our backend. As we learned in our udemy courses, we implemented mongoDB as our database for user data.
Our first goal was to build an application which allows our users to upload their bikes and to see the offers from other users. While we were building this, we also started to implement a log-in and log-out feature, to ensure that only registered users can upload their bikes. After Tyll finalized these features in our frontend and Jan implemented the backend, our tutor Johannes showed us how to host our website on Heroku.
Coming from this as our starting point, we started working on other features like the possibility of editing and deleting offered bikes. Our goal was to implement a chat function, which would allow our users to get in contact with each other and negotiate their terms of renting a bike. After some research on different platforms, we decided not to add this feature yet, instead we added a form where users can insert their contact details which can be shown additional to their offered bikes and people can get in contact by e-mail. Another idea was to add a live map from google to show our users the location of bikes in their surroundings. With limited time and tech-skills, we also decided to add a feature where users can add their district, so other users can estimate their location and duration to get the bike they want.
In the beginning of our project, we thought about a mobile app, but after some advice from our tutors we decided to develop a fully responsive website to get a good user experience on mobile devices as well. Most of the sites and features are already optimized for mobile resolution, however, not all details are covered yet. Therefore, while browsing the site on a mobile device, you might stumble upon some features, which are not displayed properly. Understanding the problem of optimizing content for various resolutions, we now regard the idea of mobile first from a different perspective.
Recognizing the amount of code which is needed for a single page to be functional and good-looking, whilst it might be helpful for understanding and learning to write the code yourself, a focus in future projects might be implementing methods of timesaving while coding. This might be a smarter design of reusable code fragments or trying out bootstrapping methods.
While the web dev team was working, the UX team continued to collect feedback from the potential target group and further adapted the design.
The solution to the problem at the moment — we are still working on more features and functions — is a website that shows you bikes in the vicinity or where you can upload your bike and offer it for rent. As soon as you want to take a more detailed look at offers, you would have to register with your email and create a profile. You can contact the offeror via the website and negotiate the price, period and payment method on your own.
The Team
Jan Köhne Web Development
Anna Langen UX Design
Tyll Röver Web Development
Clara Wittershagen UX Design
Mentors
Nina Engbert UX Design
Johannes Stricker Web Development
