Imagine a versatile system to empower people to ease access to employment and drive social innovation through frugal mobility.

How to design a mobility ecosystem that was effective enough to serve 4000 people but frugal enough to be applied in a low-income neighborhood.

How to create work opportunities for the 450 unemployed citizens of Saint-Jean with mobility as a core.

We were a team of 16 designers that went to the city of Saint-Jean in Lyon to do observations and interview a group of the citizens that we were going to be designing with. We had the opportunity to be connected with local initiatives like EmerJean, which was a consolidated NGO that worked to provide job opportunities to some of the citizens in the neighborhood. During our interviews, we noticed that Saint-Jean was a multicultural neighborhood with many people being immigrants. We also noticed that the citizens, in response to a lack of reliable government transport had already established a “System D” of sorts, with scooter sharing, bike use, and order delivery from different vendors.

Isolation: Citizens felt forgotten by the city of Lyon because there were only 2 bus lines and they were. Not reliable in their schedule.

Lack of safety and community: To be able to access some parts of the city, walking beside a canal was required. That part of the neighborhood felt unsafe and was not easy to access for older citizens and people with disabilities. 

Bus stops: Bus stops were not maintained by the city, making them not easy to use for certain citizens with disabilities or of older age.

We worked on a concept that would be modular and fluid in its application and would allow us to improve the quality of life of the citizens. One of the concepts of this idea was to design an app that would work complementing the other propositions, like offering a multimodal space. The app had to be simple enough and not too heavy in its design to be available to the type of phones of the users, but offer enough tools to help them in their everyday life. That’s how Logn’Go came to be.

Because it made use of some of the customs that the citizens were already using, the proposal was to unify it into one single place and make it more available to all the citizens. We did some usability studies to test our concept and the users liked it overall. They did mention their hesitance about how the app would take into account the real-time updates because it was really difficult to predict certain bus schedules, so we added a life feature that the users could inform the app if they were some delays so it was more precise.

We used a really simple design to only focus on the content of the app and to reduce the data consumption of its usage. Users seemed to like this feature but wondered if the design would be updated in the future.

To add, not all phones at the time (2018) allowed the use of ticket scanning, but we decided to include the option in the designs for the ones that did. In other cases, the app would show where they could buy physical tickets.

Logn’Go was a small part of a big solution, but it was rewarding to see how it was a main pillar of the final ecosystem designed for Saint-Jean (image on the side). The entire project was presented at the Conference "Movin'On 2018" in Toronto, Canada as part of the Michelin Group "Working together to move forward" topic of the forum. This was my first time designing an app, so it was a really rewarding experience.