Beryl is the latest, up-and-coming bike share and micro-mobility provider. Currently operating in London, Bournemouth and Norwich in the UK and launching in New York, summer 2020. I head up the overall design and brand for Beryl, spanning all digital and physical products.
The Beryl app enables users to unlock and hire bikes. I have been involved from the very first MVP, designing the visual language and core user experience.
The Beryl app is around 18 months old, we have gone from an MVP to a solid second-generation with over a 100,000 users during that time. With a small team of 2 designers and 5 engineers, we have created an app which challenges the best in the market.
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Every new feature goes through a level of user testing interviews. 8 to 10 people, some existing and some new users are contacted and invited into the office to discuss their experience so far with the app and to test the new feature. As well as qualitative research we also conduct smaller A/B tests through quantitive online surveys.
Problem: Bike share is designed to be convenient, however, there are a large number of users having to pay multiple fees if they want to simply nip into a store or use the toilet, they would need to lock the bike ending their ride and then start a new one once they returned.
Result: We introduced the ability to pause a journey, ensuring no extra fees were charged at that point. This feature is currently being phased into production, we aim to increase the volume of shorter journeys and A to B and back to A again journeys. We can report on this by querying journeys which start and end in the same geo-fenced parking zone.
Main Challenge: From previous research, we know users don’t always check their device when parking and locking bikes. This resulted in us building two different users flows. The user can trigger pause, pre locking or up to a minute post locking.
I worked as the main product designer. This was a heavily collaborative project involving, front-end, back-end and on-bike firmware.
Beryl has the challenge of a physical and digital product working together. I created a clear set of illustrations which I later animated to help show exactly how to unlock and lock the Beryl Bike.
We had our rendering of the bike which helped instruct the user during onboarding, however, it lacked the personality we wanted for success flows and content pages. I went away and illustrated a handful of people who fit nicely on the bike and some small add-ons for the bike which gave it a little more character.
Beryl works closely with local authorities to ensure they deliver a successful and engaging public service. Each scheme has operational requirements set by the city or local council. The dashboard has been designed to make sure key metrics are met.
Off-the-shelf wouldn’t cut it. We needed something purpose built to our specific requirements. I worked as the main product designer and during the early stages of building this product we had to conduct many stakeholder interviews to ensure the product met everyone’s requirements. Embedded firmware needed to understand the connection history and signal strength of each bike in real time. However, operations wanted to know when bikes had gone outside a service area or when parking bays had become full.
I’ve had the great opportunity of building an app, dashboard and much more from the very beginning. There are too many features to include here, but I’m happy to discuss further. Some of my favourite projects include; NFC Unlocking, Parking Bays 2.0 and the Beryl Design System.
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