The UX of flying cars: lessons on designing the future
By: Paula Macedo
Tags: Design Thinking, UX Research, Case Study, Future, UX

They informed, inspired and brought so many colors. They expanded my own vision about mobility and cities. Business travelers were the obvious early adopters for flying cars but designing only for them would never turn it into disruptive technology and interesting business. Disruptive is an overheated word but there is a nice concept around the real meaning that is the dimension of it. Something can only be disruptive if it is accessible for a large scale portion of the population.

The flying car business model only makes sense if it’s a massive service. That’s the only way to justify the investment in building the technology.

Yeah, I was there just for the simple job to help to design flying cars and I learned how narrow my vision of the world could be if I didn’t challenge the profile of our future users.

Have you heard from a blind person how they take public transportation as subways? How do they feel about it?

Did you stop yourself to think why there are so few people using wheelchairs around you and the places you go? You may think that’s because few people use it. That is not true. 1 billion people around the world experience some form of disability, it’s 15% of the population. If you think about someone that has a temporary condition and the elderly, the percentage can be even more expressive. They are definitely more representative in terms of world numbers than the high-income-business-traveler that we can see in the streets, airports, ads and urban air mobility’s reports.

Research about mobility in São Paulo, Brazil. This image is private. The participant agreed with the noncommercial use of it.

Some people can be sometimes stuck in traffic and it can really frustrate them. It can ruin their plans and make their life less happy. It is bad when you are stuck for 45 minutes, even 15 minutes… people can get really annoyed by that.

Although it can really impact the quality of life, health condition, opportunities of learning and evolve in the career, time with family and friends, resting, being creative, having a hobby and so on, for those that face 4 hours or more of traffic every day to go to work.

One may think it’s extreme. Well, it’s not and it’s growing at the same velocity that the big cities grow. In China, hundreds of thousands of workers spend on average six hours — and sometimes up to nine — commuting to and from Beijing.

In São Paulo, the biggest city in America, people spend an average of 3 hours per day in traffic.

Well, there is another type of potential user… those ones that are on the edge of alternative ways of transportation. They are looking to occupy less space in the streets that currently a car with only one person uses.

They are seeking public transportation options and bikes not just because of the cost but because they think it’s smarter and less impactful to the environment. Well, they are not well-served too. There were not big investments on public transportation in the past years as there were for car driven solutions and, in general, there is a historical abandonment of bike lanes and policies in the big cities.

From 1982 to 2001, 20% increase in population, 236% increase in cars. There were 1 billion cars on the planet in 2012, 2 billion is expected in 2020. Every week a cyclist dies in São Paulo by traffic accidents. (source)

From everything I studied all those years, there is one thing I can tell with all the conviction — the city we live in was not made for them.

The city we live in was made for and by a very specific type of body, social condition, lifestyle and age. The city was designed for car owners or those who can afford to live in central areas. That’s why cities suck. That’s why it’s broken.

The risk of designing for the inaccurate vision of early adopters when you are designing something for a large scale market it’s that there is no back in time. If you are designing the future you should challenge the way you see the future.

If you believe the desirable version of the future should be more diverse and inclusive, you may try to listen to the voices in the present, how a variety of voices are being represented — or not represented — now. Challenge your version of early adopters to gain more accurate data of who is open to trying it first and who represents the seed of the needs that is inside of the last big portion of the population.

The problem with Roger’s version of the innovation adoption cycle is that it doesn’t explain the massive disruptive technologies. The model helps us to learn the concept of the visionaries but if we characterize them as higher social status and income individuals we are not designing for the masses, their needs are different.

I prefer to read early adopters as the ones who are open to trying out new tech even before they are super optimal because they have a higher need for that and they have a mental model of trying new things.

If we look for Christen’s version of the disruptive innovation cycle, it makes sense to read the market without the income-power lens. The first ones to experiment are the ones who are open to trying less quality for price and efficiency. This model explains better the success of Netflix and Airbnb, for example.

Thinking about the “flying cars”, these users are not those ones that are crazy about cabin comfort and status of the technology but the ones who don’t have good options today and are open to shifting to a more effective (including cost) transportation mode.

In the beginning, disruptive innovation is inferior to the existing products and services in the market measured by traditional value metrics. When disruptive innovation first enters the market, it initially caters only to a small and typically not very profitable customer segment, while established organizations are focused on serving more demanding, high-end customers. https://www.viima.com/blog/disruptive-innovation

Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

Embraer success itself was an example of disruptive technology. It was a small player in the aviation industry, could not compete with Airbus and Boeing with the same product as it didn’t have the big resources to launch a big high-performance aircraft. The ERJ’s family was designed for cheaper and shorter distance flights — the regional aviation routes — that proved to be a growing market in different regions of the world. EmbraerX and the “flying cars” were also aiming for a disruptive solution, again, a large scale!

Human-centered design approaches also teach us to include the extremes, the ones who are heavy users and the ones who currently are not as engaged. If we can find patterns among them, we are probably targeting the most interesting challenges to design against.

Designing the future should be an intentional process. There is a range of variations that are out of your control, although you can frame the different scenarios, including your vision/idea there and reflect on how things can go if you are successful. The other theory influenced my process was from Lala Deheinzelin, author of “Desirable new world”, a pioneer brazilian futuristic that deserts about the creative economy and the differentiation between “probable future” and “desirable future”.

We can reflect on the way the world currently is and imagine what the probable version of the future is. It can lead us to create technology, knowledge, and structures that inevitably are going to lead to this version of the future we pictured. On the other hand, we can think about today and design the future we want to live, the desirable version of it. So, we will be creating technology, knowledge, and design that will make that possible.