Deutsche Bahn – Bike Rental

The modern form of bike rental

In the course of an iterative project design, the student team of EasyBike developed a bike sharing solution together with Deutsche Bahn Connect, which is designed for non-digital-savvy users and is presented in the context of an exhibition at the German Transport Center in Munich. EasyBike's solution creates the basis for understanding and testing digital bike sharing as part of the museum exhibition.

The mobility turnaround is inevitable in Germany, which goes hand in hand with efficient, environmentally and user-friendly transport. With the mobility turnaround, the way people move from A to B is being fundamentally changed and rethought. The topic of mobility of the future is becoming a global core issue due to societal challenges such as urbanization, new megatrends and technologies as well as changing user behavior. In the course of this, traditional market boundaries are being disrupted, resulting in the need for new business models and mobility concepts. A successful mobility turnaround requires that various building blocks interlock. The building blocks include strengthening cycling and walking, the need to network the physical and digital worlds, and the establishment of corresponding infrastructures. In particular, platform business in the area of bike sharing has a high potential.

EasyBike – an international and interdisciplinary team of students at Munich University of Applied Sciences

The Co-Innovation Lab of the Munich University of Applied Sciences brought together ten students from the fields of Computer Science and Business Administration to address the topic of bike sharing of the future and to develop an innovative solution. The focus was on a high degree of user-centricity and the processing of a wide variety of information levels in order to achieve the highest possible quality result. Within three months, the EasyBike team implemented the SCRUM project together with Deutsche Bahn Connect and was able to contribute to the mobility mix of the future.

EasyBike as a catalyst for digital bike sharing solutions

The EasyBike solution is a simple and intuitively designed app for simplified access and use of bike sharing, which is presented as part of the museum exhibition. The EasyBike app impresses with targeted guidance in the form of tutorials, a variety of unlocking options as well as the integration of a handover process of the shared bikes. In this context, the EasyBike team has rethought the bike sharing process: instead of the classic "user-to-shared bike" process, the team has additionally integrated the "shared bike-to-user" functionality to enhance the user experience. The EasyBike solution can thus be understood as a lever for the use of bike sharing. While at the museum exhibition, the EasyBike solution acts as a vision of the future and a test environment, a positive user experience can be the basis for the use of digital bike sharing solution outside of the exhibition and thus a larger target group, i.e. non-digital affine citizens, can be developed.