Project Overview + Scope
My team and I were invited to develop a responsive mobile-first web product that would solve some of the practical challenges existing in the space of transportation. Within this broad problem space, we focused the scope of our work around the area of ride-sharing.
The Challenge
The team set out to understand the behavior of ride-sharers and the challenges they commonly face in ride-share scenarios, and to take forward key research insights in designing our responsive mobile-first web solution.
We theorized that ride-sharers want to find affordable and reliable journeys that feel safe and comfortable, and wanted to validate some assumptions:
- Vehicle owners often have spare space that they are willing to share on trips;
- Travelers want low cost ways of getting around;
- People like having company during trips;
- Riders want to schedule their transportation and arrive on time;
- People have ride-sharing safety concerns;
- People struggle to find people to ride-share with in their area.
With these in mind, we posed ourselves the following challenge:
How might we connect vehicle owners and potential passengers to share trips in a safe and social way that allows them to share the cost and minimize cancellations?
Research Method
Our goal was to validate whether these assumptions held up in the real world. We screened and carried out user interviews with 5 members of our target audience —ride-sharers — following a structured script to capture the insights needed to check our assumptions.
Interviews were held in-person and over Zoom, and recorded and auto-transcribed in the Otter app.
What We Found Out
Analyzing the transcripts and collecting individual insights, we synthesized these insights through an iterative grouping process based on shared similarities to illuminate key themes.
Key Themes
Through this process we uncovered seven themes. We took forward the following five as actionable insights to inform our design solution:
- Female riders have safety concerns when ride-sharing.
- Inconsistent pricing makes riders less inclined to ride-share.
- There tends to be a shared connection between fellow riders.
- Riders feel they don’t have enough control over scheduling of pick-up and drop-off.
- Socializing is a big part of the ride-sharing experience for riders.
Designing With Our User In Mind
From our research insights, we developed a fictional representative of our target audience — Erin — to help us better understand their goals, needs and challenges from a personalized perspective:
Revisiting Our Challenge
From there, we were able to hone our design challenge with a more specific set of needs in mind:
How might we help solo female travelers get around in a safe and cost-efficient way?
We further zoomed in on a specific scenario that Erin might typically face.
It’s the end of a late night party and Erin is looking to get home, but she:
- Doesn’t have someone to accompany her late at night
- Faces poor public transportation options
- Faces surge pricing across ride-hailing services while lacking other viable options
- Feels unsafe in her physical environment waiting for her ride
- Feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable being alone with the driver
The night-in-the-life view through Erin’s eyes helps us better understand and design for her concerns. Our product needed to address:
- Solo safety concerns » Pairing riders with a trusted buddy
- Traveling with a trusted person » Pairing fellow riders with a shared connection within a preferred network
- Cost saving » Having another person to share the fare with
- Scheduling » Ability to specify scheduling preferences
- Social interaction » Facilitating a pleasant social experience
Prioritizing Features
We brainstormed freely the features that could provide these solutions, and used a couple of prioritization techniques to narrow down a large feature set into a much smaller set of must-have essentials.
Let’s Get Designing!
Several rounds of sketching and critiquing as a team allowed us to concretize our proposed features and how they would come together.
MVP Reveal
We were excited with the final concept we came up with. Introducing: Buddy Up — a network-based buddy system for ride-sharers, connecting riders to other fellow riders within their extended contacts and preferred social and work networks who are looking to take a complementary route.
It addresses the insights from our research by:
- Finding riders a trustworthy travel buddy, through:
- Tagging college/work/club networks
- Syncing phone/social media contacts
- Leaving buddy reviews
- Splitting the cost of a ride with a buddy
- Setting preferred departure windows
- Give ride-share buddies badges to signify Good conversation and other good qualities
Mid-Fidelity Screens
We created some initial mid-fidelity designs for our product:
Set up new profile
Search for buddy
Buddy up
Rate my buddy
User Testing
An initial round of user testing revealed we needed to:
- Make the phone number verification more intuitive;
- Simplify the buddy results list and buddy profile cards;
- Make the buddy rating prompt more obvious.
High-Fidelity Screens
Making the needed improvements, we created the following high-fidelity designs:
Set up new profile
Search for buddy
Buddy up
Rate my buddy
High-fidelity Desktop Site
And we created the accompanying responsive desktop designs:
More User Testing + Recommendations
A second round of testing showed our improvements were successful, and provided additional insights for further development. The most important being:
- Users wanted to be able to report bad buddies in addition to rating them
Safe Ride-Sharing, Solved!
