Scooter Companion App
A smart scooter companion app built for urban commuters—offering real-time navigation, advanced ride controls, driving insights, and seamless scooter management.
(Company)
Apollo Scooters
(Company Profile)
Electric Scooter Brand
(TIMELINE)
~1.5 years
(responsibilities)
Information Architecture
User Research
UI/UX Design
Design System
(Platforms)
iOS, Android.
Context
(My Role)
Lived in commuters’ shoes — a year in Montreal with an hour-long daily commute.
My role:
Understanding the problem & ideation
I committed to understanding the core user experience by analyzing all available qualitative and quantitative data. I gathered user feedback, identified key problems, and created user flows and low-fidelity wireframes based on these findings.
Collaboration across the board
As the only designer on a small team, I collaborated with pretty much everyone—directors, customer support, developers, hardware and maintenance teams, and marketing. I incorporated their knowledge of the users, past decisions, and ongoing constraints. My goal was to align user needs with business priorities as much as possible.
Design execution
I created hi-fi mocks and interactive prototypes, the design system and prepared specs for development handoff. I presented work to stakeholders, iterated based on user feedback and insights (when available), and adapted designs to the constraints.
(project)
Apollo Scooters was founded in 2016 by 2 friends who aims solve urban commuting problems in a better way than what was available at the time.
I joined the team in June 2021, at a time when the company only had an MVP version of the scooter companion app and a e-commerce platform. My main focus during the first 6 month was to completely revamp the app, with the first version of the redesign scheduled to be presented at the company retreat
The original app had been developed by a third-party studio and offered only limited functionality. No user research or usability testing were done.
The position was on-site in Montreal, Canada, so my family and I relocated there.
(The Team)
CTO
Product Manager
4 Developers
UX Designer (me)
Discovery & Research
(User research)
Research is the foundation of a solid product
If the one thing I now about research it's that it shows insights nobody would think.
While I was given some freedom around user research, both time and budget were limited. So I started with what we already had: qualitative data collected internally. This included insights from colleagues, customer support feedback, a quick competitor analysis and experience user pains myself.
After compiling all data together I came up with 2 personas. One of them will be presented here.
Based on my research I wrote 2 main personas. But this case study is about this guy.
Meet David, 35 y.o. engineer from New York.
David is happy with his Apollo scooter, however he experiences some issues with the app.
(Solution)
Intuitive, useful, more engaging
Revamp app's informational architecture
Revamp dashboard, settings, store, ride history and statistic.
Accessibility improvements
Increase fonts to readable value, add support of iOS Dynamic Type and Android Font Scaling. Improve color contrast.
Make ride stats engaging and useful
Add more ride stats, make it clearly and more engaging, add achievements.
Update the store
Show accessories that fits David's scooter, services and parts he might need.
Once the first prototypes were up and running, I ran a quick usability study.
A few months later, I finally got the chance to dive into deeper foundational research. That’s when we uncovered several key insights and some of which led to interesting features no one'd expected.
With all that input, we defined the vision for v.2.0, set the design scope, the must-haves and the nice-to-haves.
Design
Yeah, you probably know Murphy’s Law:
"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
The redesign below is v.1.0 I made based on data from the research. It looks a bit extra polished because part of this task was to present it as a live proto at the company retreat. Everyone loved it and couldn’t wait to see it live.
Prototype insights I learned during some Café studies and usability test:
The information architecture is way clearer now.
The dashboard steel feels a bit overwhelming.
Accessibility is better now.
The store looks way more useful.
Ride stats still need more depth to be engaging.
Achievements didn’t turn out as fun as we hoped.
The biggest challenge in this project so far was finding the right balance between business and user goals, and what could be realistically delivered.
Dev team was involved early on, but just a few weeks into estimating, it started being clear we wouldn’t hit the deadline.
So we decided to keep the core changes and move forward with a more conservative version, rolling things step by step.
Results
(Feature 1)
New navigation open new horizons
After it was decided it makes sense to remove the store and friends activity. I started exploring how we can both simplify app navigation and improve focus on the main things: scooter and map. My exploration ended in pretty bold idea to introduce new hierarchical navigation with modal sheets opens by in-app controls. The idea could a few of our core issues at once and it worth the risk.
Now I started with explaining total logic with the drawn wireframes. I test it with users and make sure developers' team deeply understand it and it's implementable within new deadline.
(Feature 2)
Clear Settings
(Feature 3)
Updated Ride Statystic
(Feature 4)
3 Brand New Dashboards
(Feature 5)
Scooter Stolen Mode
This was the toughest feature I worked on in this project. It came with many of limitations — every single piece of data had to be double-checked with hardware team to even see if it was accessible. On top of that, only a few scooter models could support it, and it required expensive hardware, an active SIM card, and a paid subscription.
My experience told me there had to be a simpler solution for users — even if it technically wasn’t my job to find one.
My first suggestion was to offer current scooter owners a discounted Apollo Lock, so they could safely leave their scooters outside stores.
The second idea was to pause development and wait for the next WWDC, where Apple was expected to open up the same Geolocation API used by AirTags. That way, we could build a much cheaper version of the feature with minimal app changes and lower costs for the company.
The first idea was accepted. The second one—not.
I supported the dev team through the whole process, which took almost six months before the feature finally launched.
About a year later, the company decided it was no longer sustainable to keep supporting this feature. It’s now being removed and replaced with a solution based on Apple’s Geolocation API.
(worth mentioning)
When I started working on the website, I found there was no consistency in branding or how design tokens were used. Everyone was using slightly different colors, fonts, logos, paddings, and so on. It slowed me down a lot, so I decided to build a basic design system.
I cleaned up our logo typeface, defined the colors and how to use them, picked typefaces with usage rules, and set paddings, spacings, sizes, and icons.
Since it was just for internal use and to save time, I built it as a Figma prototype.
Figma Prototype
(retrospective)
