Context

Cittamobi, already consolidated as the biggest Brazilian public transport app, also has a B2B gateway for transport card transactions. It is used to transact more than 420 million reais per year through partnerships with other companies.

Exploring this opportunity on payments, a B2C solution was also available to the passengers, but it represented less than 2% of the app's revenue per quarter and there was room to increase it. Therefore, the team concentrated in understanding and tackling the problem to improve usability and increase profitability in an agile way.

An overview of the legacy flow of transport card payments in Cittamobi. 2022.

User research

In the project's kick-off, the product managers shared their evidences and hypotheses on the problem’s roots. According to them, it seemed like a problem with user acquisition inside the product. Problems to use the app were also raised as hypotheses to the low revenue share.

After 30 surveys and 80 Customer Success tickets reviewed, the team validated the strongest hyphotesis: most users were not aware of the transport card payment feature. The participants that already knew the feature alleged difficulties on finishing their payments, which later on was confirmed as a combined problem of legacy UI and flaws in synchronous processing.

This is how the feature's user flow used to look like. Yellow post-its are hypotheses from the team.

Designing the outcomes

The most important item to be addressed was the discoverability of the feature. We made sure to cover multiple touchpoints on the user journey, from the moment they opened the app to when they were interacting with other functions and would see the payment option as a shortcut.

From left to right: onboarding drawer, home screen shortcut with card's balance and new look and feel based on real world correspondency.

Through the interviews, shadowing and Firebase events analysis, the team realized that several users weren't able to reach the end of the flow and recharge successfully. Therefore, a UI/UX refactor was made to simplify the payment steps.

On the technical side, Cittamobi's engineering team turned the payment processing into an asynchronous operation, so it would preserve the user transactions during edge cases. The QA also joined this process to anticipate high priority exceptions that would have to be handled.

From left to right: onboarding drawer, home screen shortcut with card's balance and new look and feel based on real world correspondency.

With the improvements, now the users need 4 to 5 interactions to get their card recharged. In the legacy flow, it would take at least twice more.

Besides being quicker to find and to use, the flow also gave visibility to managerial tasks, such as transactions history or add/edit/remove a card.

Results and metrics

After the implementation, an alfa test was conducted with ten employees to track the feature’s performance and catch critical bugs. Following the first adjustments, a closed beta test was conducted in collaboration with a bus operator. We also ran open beta testing with the users, gathering over 5.000 participants in a month.

When the definitive rollout happened, the new payment flow was generating already 50% more transactions. When looking at quarters, we noticed an increase of 80% on recharges revenue from Q1 2023 to Q1 2025. Besides revenue (this was the OMTM, 'one metric that matters'), the Customer Success team observed a 5% reduction on the tickets related to payments and transactions.

Next steps

During the course of these improvements, members from Apple and Google reached out to hear more about the case and how it could be boosted by iOS and Android newest technologies.

This way, the team had the opportunity to attend Apple's annual event for developers (WWDC) in the Silicon Valley on 2024 to dive into emerging payment and AI technologies. In 2025, it was our turn to attend Google IO and explore new possibilities for Android.

Picture from Apple's main keynote in the United States, that took place on June 10th 2024.

Overall, this project was a really satisfying challenge and the effort behind each part of it was definitely paid off through the accomplished metrics and the opportunities that came after the first iterations.

The steps presented above were only the beginning of the revolution of public transport payments in Brazil and Cittamobi still has a lot to come. Here I list a few of the next opportunities that have been studied and tested to keep this transformation going:

• Recharge through a WhatsApp chatbot

• Low balance notifications

• Enterprise transport payments

• Recharge with Siri and other personal assistants

• Use transport cards through Apple & Google Pay