The semesterly mass exodus

Every time a school break rolls around, there’s a mass exodus of Cornell students to other areas within driving distance of Ithaca. At the Syracuse Airport, 1.5 hours outside of Ithaca, you can always spot an endless number of students wearing Cornell sweatshirts around the times of breaks. With Ithaca being in such a remote location, there is no readily available transportation for students out of Ithaca. Between town rideshare options that feel unsafe to students, as well as few and far in between buses that come at inconvenient times and in unfavorable locations, students are left with limited transportation options that are oftentimes costly, inefficient, and distressing for students on tight schedules. Enter: Scoop — the app that promotes sustainable and affordable travel for students traveling within driving distance of Ithaca.

The Problem

Cornell students want affordable, convenient, and safe ways to travel to and from places within driving distance of Ithaca. Currently students struggle to find options that fit their needs because:

1. Many students don’t have cars with them on campus

2. Many students don’t feel safe getting rides from existing rideshare groups (ie, Ithaca Rideshare) because they wouldn’t know the driver well enough to trust them

3. Buses pick people up and arrive at inconvenient times and in unideal locations

Paving the road ahead

With the start of the Spring 2022 semester, I stepped into the role of Product Manager for Scoop. At the time Scoop was merely an idea: I had no name for the product, no sketches of what it could look like, no list of features for the MVP, only the research and problem statement. As the product manager, I wrote a roadmap laying out the work I was hoping the team could complete during the semester: noting the problem, our starting location, final destination, timeline, check points, and key aspects of team culture. Going into our second semester as a team this fall, I was challenged to write a new product roadmap for Scoop that will guide us towards launching this semester. When writing the roadmap, I aim to divide out work into succinct phases of work throughout the semester, so that members know exactly what they should be doing, why they are doing it, and what we’re working toward.

Empathizing with the users

Before the Spring 2022 semester began, I invested a lot of time into researching the problem space further by interviewing members of Scoop’s target audience, conducting market research, and leading a competitor analysis to understand why existing solutions fail to fulfill users’ needs.

From our market research, there were 2 key findings: (1) 3 out of 5 students end up driving long distances out of Ithaca alone, even thought they would rather not drive such long distances alone, and (2) 70% of people expect to know the person they are getting in a car with in some capacity. The latter finding led me to research further to understand what the exact degree of familiarity that people desire is.

When conducting user interviews, I spoke to users about the minimum connection they would need to a person in order to feel comfortable getting in a car with them, as well as about the different instances in which they find themselves traveling to and from Ithaca — speaking to both people who do and do not live within driving distance of Ithaca.

Pictured to the left is a table of high level trends and insights from the competitor analysis, market research, and user interviews that I conducted. The 2 primary findings from this research that shaped the trajectory of the product vision were as follows:

Ideating the solutions

As we kicked off working on Scoop at the start of the spring 2022 semester, I began by work with the other designers on the team to ideate on all the possible features that could be created to solve the problem at hand, and then sort these features based on which would be necessary for the MVP. We launched into our ideation session by ideating 70+ “how might we” (HMW) statements in which we contemplated “how might we…” solve the different aspects of this problem. Then, we aggregated these HMWs into several different opportunity areas, based on what their approach to solving the problem at hand was. Lastly, we brainstormed 30+ feature solution ideas for the app by answering the questions presented in every “HMW” question.

For instance, for a HMW like HMW decrease the social awkwardness of traveling with someone you don’t know, there would be a potential solution to this statement, such as allowing users to post rides with a friend so that you’ll have a friend, as well as someone you don’t know, traveling with you. 

Pictured above is a glimpse into our FigJam file for our Scoop ideation session

Making design decisions

After ideation, we narrowed down all of the potential features into 2 categories: (1) MVP features and (2) Non-MVP features. Part of our analysis in this was considering what was the most basic collection of features we could put together to accomplish our solution idea of creating a platform that connects students who are traveling to the same location with each other. Second, we did a feasibility versus impact analysis to ensure we were proceeding with features that would have both high feasibility and high impact. An example of this analysis is illustrated below.

Designing the solution

Next, we worked on designing the 3 flows that we decided were necessary for the MVP: (1) Onboarding / profile set up, (2) posting a ride, and (3) searching for rides. We worked on each flow in 2 week intervals, iterating on medium fidelity versions of each flow. After several weeks of experimenting with different visual design systems, we decided on a system that would emphasize Scoop’s core values of sustainability, affordability, and safety. Ultimately, we converted our final medium fidelity designs into high fidelity using our newly created design system, and handed these off to the frontend and backend developers to implement. Below is an example of the pros & cons analysis we would do with different medium fidelity iterations. This example zooms into the searching for a ride flow.

After this analysis, we oftentimes decide to take the best aspects of all of the different iterations we’ve been considering and combine them as we refine the visual design of the flow. Ultimately, we combined different iterations into the following high fidelity search flow, that clearly indicates the information users must input before searching, has easy to use calendar displays as well as auto populated searches, and allows users to filter by type of ride (student driving or shared taxi). We decided that the type of ride would be better as a filter, so that users can first see how many search results they have for the date and locations they provided (as this is the criteria that is less flexible), and then filter if there are plenty of options that fit their search. Below is an image of the high fidelity searching flow that combines the best of the medium fidelity iterations.

Reflections & Future Plans

My experience as Product Manager Scoop has been one of the biggest growth experiences in my design career. Although I have taken several frontend and backend development courses throughout my college curriculum, I had never learned much about the day to day work that the frontend and backend developers do when it comes to app development. As product manager, I learned the specifics of what each role entails in order to write the timeline and roadmap for all members of my team. I also learned how to define success metrics that will accurately measure the growth of a product and whether or not it is solving the problem that was originally identified. Lastly, I learned the importance of defining a clear product vision from the start of a project, such that all team members always know what they should be doing, why they’re doing it, and what goal we are working towards. Leading a product team is like directing a ship — all of the sailors have different roles, and need clear direction on where our final destination is in order to steer the ship in the right direction. My experience fostering a team culture, and leading a talented group of sailors last semester was invaluable to my growth as a product thinker, and I’m so beyond excited to set sail again this semester and launch our app.

Huge shout out to all the team members who have been working on Scoop since last semester. I have had so much fun working with everyone — from coding and designing, to making pasta dinners together.