What do users really want?

We have interviewed several of them to outline their preferences when it come to choosing the ideal e-scooter. They replied to a questionnaire designed in order to achieve key information and use it to design an as-close-as-possible-to-ideal eletric scooter that would best fit the users’ wishes.

Katy, as well as other users aged 40 and above, privilege safety, comfort, and design of course: compact, innovative, elegant, sophisticated, possibly Made in Italy. They normally use electric scooters during the week, mostly during springtime and summer to move through the city center, to meet clients and partners and they recur to public transportation to cover the main distance from home to the city center. No one within this cluster of mature users, mostly professionals, is happy with the existing offer. They consider it too cheap in terms of material and quality, also quite unsafe, often unpractical and most of all not compact enough. Compactness, for many of them, turns out to be not only a strong desire on-the-road
but also –and especially- off-the-road, once the trip is over and the problem becomes parking, damage, theft. They dream of a truly foldable e-scooter, an easily compactable object, hand-transportable and stowable.

Bertrand, Alice and their 30 aged-peers, are young professionals. The e-scooters’ folding feature collects most of their attention as they consider as crucial hand-carrying them in the subway, or discretely stowing them in an office corner, at arms’ and eyes’ length. However, foldability must be easily and quickly achievable and most of all, not just a gimmick as it has been invariably the case, so far. Folding the handlebar stem over the body is not the desired solution, for it does not make the vehicles more compact, nor comfortably transportable, nor stowable, once off-road.

Luke is a “green” student, aged 23 and he says: “To my mind, modern products should advocate and promote a sustainable life. Specifically, a life in which people get to have ‘more time for life’. They believe in their own personal well-being and to that of our planet.” According to Luke peers, responsible progress should ease peoples’ mobility in urban centers by mitigating the problems of traffic, emissions, search for and costs of parking space, theft risk and definitely, urban stress. Students are less season sensitive and broader users then their elder peers, both in terms of trip’s length and of number of days. In fact, many younger users jump on the e-scooter also during weekends to join friends at the usual meeting points.

Although they seem to focus more on performance: read power, efficiency and autonomy, plus price, they share at least one desire with elder users: ease of transport off the road. Alex seems to have clear ideas concerning the features of the ideal e-scooter.

“Concretely, I can’t wait to see an easily foldable [e-scooter; editor’s note] on the market to lay it down in the university amphi during a class, then bring it with me in the metro without bothering my neighbors and possibly hold it in the locker of a car, or even of a boat. I have heard that Linkable’s level of foldability and portability is astonishing and that their foldability is not only about functional convenience, as once folded Linkable’s products do not lose their stylish touch. That’s great!”