Fly Free

Challenge: Women need a subtle, easy and comfortable way to ride bicycles while wearing dresses of skirts without changing their behavior or clothing

Solution: Fly Free a magnetic clip on a retractable cord that can be fit onto a bicycle frame

Logistics: 3 weeks, 3 people

My role: User research; build and test prototypes; film and edit product videos

Lessons Learned: Simplicity in design, importance of user research and human-centered design

Design Process

User Research

From the initial 60 women we spoke to, we learned that many women avoided biking in skirts.

The pain point for most women was wind so we decided to focus on this.

State of the Art and Specs

The current state of the art include changing clothing (wearing cycling shorts under skirt), creative DIY solutions that tie the front and back of your skirt together, skirt clips, and changing cycling behavior (riding with knees together, one hand on lap..)

All these solutions require the user to change their behavior or clothing and are not seamlessly a part of the bike.

We realized that these two specifications were important if our users were actually going to use and benefit from our product. Other specifications were:

Brainstorming, failure and things that didn’t work

Fly Free was the result of a long design process that saw many failed prototypes. Some that didn't quite work (our pull-out-bicycle-shorts) and others that were very effective but were not the most subtle solution (fold-out-bicycle-wings).