Inside the ride: Experience Design
We’re revolutionizing the way city-dwellers move. As we travel at lightning speed into uncharted territory, the ride can be a little bumpy – both the challenges we face and the possibilities at our fingertips are endless. But at VanMoof, we’re not just here to keep up. To always stay one step ahead, we put our ears to the ground, listen to our rider community, make plans, and get to work. It’s time to spotlight the people who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make our innovations a reality. This is our world. This is life inside the ride.
Our riders lie at the core of everything we do at VanMoof. They’re both our greatest source of inspiration and our toughest critics. It all comes down to the details of your VanMoof experience – whether you’re just getting started, or you're a seasoned rider. That’s where our Experience Design team comes in.
The Experience Design team works tirelessly across the entire customer experience to bring exciting features and indispensable services to life. Their goal? To make the VanMoof experience as seamless, inspiring, and unparalleled in both its functionality, and its feel as it possibly can be. To do just that, Head of Experience Design, Shannon E. Thomas’ first point of call is our riders themselves: “The rider is everything. The rider is at the center of what we do.”To flesh out the entire user experience, from intricately mapping each journey, to warning a rider of an impending downpour, Shannon places herself in the pedals of each of every one of our 130,000 and counting riders.
“A customer who’s just finished a ride might want to know different things [compared] to a customer who’s been riding for a year,” Shannon explains. “When it comes to designing an experience, you really have to take into consideration your users' needs.” Shannon guides the team towards making sure each feature is “as useful and delightful as possible”, accommodating the needs of everyone and anyone who picks up a VanMoof.
The data with which we provide our riders is pretty unique too. A coordinated, consistent, and playful user experience that immediately makes a rider feel part of our growing VanMoof community – whether they’re an e-bike veteran, or a fresh-faced rider just joining the journey – is key to the Experience Design team’s approach. Experience Designer Natalia Bourges explains that what distinguishes VanMoof from other tracking apps, is that we don’t use GPS from the rider’s phone. Instead, the data we collect and present back to a VanMoof user comes from the bike itself.
The thinking behind this decision, Shannon explains, comes from a respect for riders’ data: “Whenever we’re collecting data we want to make sure we’re giving them a benefit. Data is very precious and we’re treating it that way.” By collecting data from the bike, the rider’s privacy is protected, but we’re still able to narrate the interesting stories their bike has to tell – including a ride’s distance, speed, number of stops en route, their total rides, and their average duration.
The VanMoof app isn’t just for beating your top speed along that straight on your way to work. It’s also where we give our riders the chance to customize their VanMoof to fit as snug as a glove. You can control everything from the beam of your lights, touch to unlock, and alarm settings, to gear shifting, motor assistance level, and bell sounds. It’s also your go-to for updating the bike’s firmware so you’re always riding our smoothest tech. The app serves as an extension of the bike – it’s there to provide you with all-important support when you need it, from solving a mysterious error code, to letting us know your bike needs hunting down by our ruthless Bike Hunter teams.
The team is constantly in pursuit of something better. In refining each detail by repeatedly questioning “how can something be just a little bit better?”, the overarching experience takes on a newly polished shine. For Shannon, keeping creativity flowing is a key part of her working process. Intensive design sprints with the team at Amsterdam HQ combined with reworking ideas on night rides around the city provide Shannon with the inspiration born from time away from the screen.
Finding the solutions to the shape-shifting problems the team confronts each day is never easy: “When there’s a problem that we can’t quite crack, I will take it home with me, I'll walk around with it, I'll even dream about it.” But Shannon’s relentless dedication to problem-solving is one that’s rewarded with impressive results. And for our riders out there, rest assured – there’s plenty in store to get excited about.
Find your nearest VanMoof Brand Store, Service Hub, or certified workshop location and take the VanMoof S3 & X3 for a test ride today.
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