SPIN
Designing the invisible — a swappable battery system and digital-physical integration for shared e-bikes, where the goal was an experience so frictionless you stop noticing it entirely.
Type
Service Design & UX
Timeline
4 months
My role
Interaction Designer
Team
3 Designers, 2 Researchers
Challenge
SPIN came to our team with a logistics problem. They wanted to expand their fleet of micromobility vehicles and introduce an e-bike, but could already tell that vehicles taking up docking at stations just for charging was going to cause widespread problems. The obvious solution was to use swappable batteries to decrease vehicle downtime, but the question was: can we create a self-sustaining system where riders do the swapping themselves?
Solution
After extensive research and concept testing, our design recommendation was to have a fleet of battery-swappable vehicles maintained and serviced by SPIN field teams and not by riders themselves (because they don't want to). The physical design of a new e-bike took this into account with an anti-theft battery compartment, and the batteries themselves were optimized for quick and easy installation, transportation, and storage.
Key Learnings
When people are out and about, they don't yet another thing they have to do. Even with incentives like free rides, rewards points, or cash-value items, riders don't want to spend their time and energy on something they see as "vehicle maintenance." Especially for a service the're already paying to use in the first place. The only thing riders care about is getting where they're going and knowing ahead of time whether the vehicle they've chosen is going to have enough battery power to get them there.
People love shared e-bikes for one reason: they're frictionless.
No ownership, no parking, no planning — just get on and go. The moment you introduce something that breaks that flow, you've broken the product. This project set out to solve a specific problem: swappable batteries.
The research told us something crucial.
Every solution that involved the rider was dead on arrival. People didn't want the responsibility of doing maintenance on a vehicle they didn't own.
Bridging digital and physical.
If the app showed a scooter with a full battery, could a light on the vehicle confirm that from across the street? If running low, could the light signal it before opening the app?
