We have recently completed a test cycle of Critical Bug Hunting + Customer Feedback on a new Pirelli's product, or rather a well-known product in the field of hotel business that is now open to a Consumer market. We are talking about CYCL-e around™, an e-bike rent service that gives corporate employees the opportunity to cover both the home-office journey and any other routes in their spare time.
Our testers have executed all the steps of the Customer Journey: booking the e-bike, making the payment, unlock the e-bike, use it and return it to automatic lockers with the rental kit. Our testers identified any critical bugs, but more importantly they provided advice and suggestions to improve the usability of the service.
Saverio Campisi, Digital Product Manager at Pirelli, talks about the impact of UNGUESS*’s work on the CYCL-e around™ project in this interview.
What’s CYCL-e around™? Can you tell us how the project was born?
The CYCL-e around™ project has been active for several years in the hotel business, but we have recently launched the service to a new audience.
Two years ago, our e-bikes were already bookable at some luxury hotels. It was concierges’ job to register guests to the service and manage the bike rental. Last year, during the first lockdown, we gave free access to our fleet to the medical staff of two hospitals in Milan. The initiative, known as Ride Safe, was the pilot for the launch of the service for corporates and their employees, that we later tested with UNGUESS's community. The road map is still long and there will be new openings with business models addressed not only to corporate employees but also to consumers.
UNGUESS was involved to test the new booking process.
In luxury hotels, usually the Concierge manages the booking process, leaving the guest the carefree use of the e-bike. With the introduction of the corporate rental model for employees, a radical change was necessary. Autonomy and usability became the main principles of the service.
With UNGUESS, we tested all the rental process to make sure that it was intuitive and user-friendly.
The audience and their needs changed, so it was important to test the service with real users. This is the reason why you asked our Crowd.
In the world of digital products there are no certainties, but only hypotheses that need to be validated with experiments that involve real users. Historically, Pirelli has had a B2B approach mostly addressed to tire dealers and hotels. With the launch of CYCL-e around™ to corporate employees, the user base expanded to the more variegated consumer world. In fact, the UNGUESS's Crowd was involved to replicate a well representing target client based on user sample, which was made of heterogeneous “user personas”.
You already received the report with the results. But what did you expect to see before the test started?
We assumed there could be some unintuitive steps in the booking process. Now I can say that my doubts did not match a real risk.
Some unplanned and – wrongly – underrated necessities emerged. For example, from the test we learned that the tester trend was often to search instructions on the use of the e-bike. Thanks to this feedback, we promptly highlighted this information so anyone could quickly find it.
This was not the first test with UNGUESS. Which was - and still is - the added value?
It was definitely the possibility to validate effectively the hypotheses made during the design and development phases. And the best way to do this is to involve potential real users of the service.
Testing never ends. Sometimes companies make the mistake of only testing once to make sure of the quality of the product, then never test again. We know that this is not a best practice because technology and user needs change. So, what is the next step? How will you continue to guarantee a tailor-made experience to your users?
For its own nature, a digital product must evolve constantly according to market feedbacks, so it will be meaningless to stop testing once the service has been launched. It is impossible to think that the product is complete, in fact we already have many ideas and potential evolutions in backlog for CYCL-e around™. Some of these will be processed starting from market feedbacks, some others will be built ex-novo. In both cases, they will generate hypotheses that real users will validate.
Great, Saverio. One last thing: how would you define UNGUESS in one word?
I would say insightful. Tests like this give you not only the perception of IF the product “works” but also the perception of HOW to make it “work” better.
*At the time of the interview, UNGUESS was known as AppQuality, as the rebranding happened in January 2022. That's why we have changed "AppQuality" into "UNGUESS" throughout this whole blog post.