Integrating mobile and real life
Convenient, easy-to-use bike rental systems are popping up in quite a few enlightened, relatively flat cities now. Paris, Lyon, Barcelona and now Nice have them that I’ve seen - there are probably plenty more. I finally had the opportunity to try them out this summer in Nice.
The service is called Velo Bleu, and features 900 cycles at 90 locations across the city which is much larger than most people think. The bikes themselves are very solid, to put it politely, designed for long service in a rough environment. That translates to heavy and slow if you are used to good bicycles. However the objective of the system is not Tour de France performance, but instead convenience.
So how did it score on that? Well, signing up initially was quite straightforward - but had to be done via a voice system, not view either the stations or mobile internet. Renting a bike was not so good. Each rental station has a number of heads that can lock up to three bikes each. Each station appears to have an embedded SIM card and its own phone number - so you have to call a specific number to unlock a bike. Nice idea, I supposed, but in execution it was very clunky as you can’t put a convenient number into your address book.
However there were two big issues - one was that the error messages were hopeless, the second was that the initial station we tried was down. None of the heads were working. Walking 500m to the nearest station and it worked better. The key usability fault was the need to subscribe for the day before being able to do anything. The user interface and error messages didn’t make that clear.
It was also amusing to see that the if you selected the English user interface the error messages were still in French! Not a problem for me as I am fluent in the language, but could be problematic for others.
Once we did get a bike out of the lock, we found we could only rent one. Bit of a problem for two people, one of whom was too young to have phone, ie my younger daughter. Turned out, however, that the bike was too heavy for a child to cycle conveniently. We duly return the bike to a neighbouring station after an agreeable peddle/trot along the Promenade des Anglais.
Returning the bike was painless - the lock mechanism being able to identify the bike without the need for any further interaction.
I’d certainly use the service again, and being able to register on the move was good. Not all bike sharing networks offer that capability. If I were designing the interface I’d use a mechanism that didn’t require each station to have its own number, although I recognise that there is a good security argument for this approach. I’d prefer to have a mobile app, which I believe is the case in Barcelona. IVR plus an identifier for the station would be easier to use. I’d also try and make the station screens easier to read in bright sunlight, as it was occasionally very difficult to review the instructions.
