mytaxi — an unsolicited redesign
Background
Couple of weeks ago, I discovered mytaxi from a job portal, while I was browsing through Product Designer roles. Hailing from India, I haven’t got a chance to use mytaxi service yet, but have good experiences using other taxi services in the market.
One thing I really liked about mytaxi is the name. I believe that having “My” in a service gives a personal feeling and attachment of the product for the users. After checking out mytaxi on the internet, I decided to give it a try. A brief about mytaxi follows
mytaxi, founded in June 2009, brought the international taxi market into the 21st century and redefined it around the world. The concept based on the idea of establishing a direct connection between drivers and passengers to offer both sides a modern alternative to conventional booking processes.
mytaxi is powerful, especially with the preferences it gives to a user. After going through the booking flow, I finally decided to work on some improvements which I felt could make a difference on the product.
The redesign is unsolicited, so it’s strictly based on my experience with taxi booking apps, as a user and a designer. Since I did not have access to user data and/or research about mytaxi’s current design, I did my very best to think through every single detail and keep the overall feel of the app intact.
I broke up the redesign into two phases:
- Current Design Analysis — An evaluation of the current app
- Unsolicited Redesign — Suggestions for a better User Experience through a more intuitive User Interface
Current Design Analysis
A pain point that I identified was in the information architecture of the app.The booking options, preferences and time are always hidden and requires the user to do an extra tap. Feature wise the product is promising, but in terms of discovering the features, I felt it is not doing the intended job. I visualized the current information architecture to see what was going on:
Pain Points
Hidden features — mytaxi’s preferences and options are hidden from the main screen. It look me the third instance to figure out that there are features such as choosing a pickup time, and adding your trip preferences. Now, my case is that I was trying to explore the whole app, opposed to a general customer. Pickup time is something I felt should happen in one tap — the reason being there can only be two customer intend when they come to a taxi app, which are to book a taxi for now, or for later.
Redesign — Let’s get to work
To start with, I rearranged the information architecture(IA) and redesigned some of the user interface (UI). Here I will try to address the problems.
Revised Information Architecture
Main goal in doing the reorganizing of the information architecture was to:
- Increase discoverability of the key features in the app for an easy access
- Make the booking flow smoother by increasing the speed of selection.
Here’s my version of the revised IA:
Ideation and Paper Prototyping
What’s more fun than drawing on paper! I sketched out some solutions to structure different ideas before committing to the high-fidelity designs.
UX Suggestions and Redesign
For the redesign exploration, I took multiple approaches to see what would work and what would not, mainly because these design suggestions are based on hypothesis and not on real data, analytics or user behaviours. Below you can find multiple re-design explorations.
Exploration #1: Appbar
This can be controversial, because I introduced a Hamburger menu. But the reason I used a hamburger menu, and an appbar is to separate the features. Even though hamburger menu has its flaws, many more users are used to what a three vertically aligned icon look like, and the positioning of the hamburger menu icon. The other change is to put mytaxi and match switcher on the appbar, defining through the visual language its hierarchy on the top.
Exploration #2: Quick Preferences
I re-imagined preferences as a horizontally scrollable block. This way whatever options were selected will be highlighted and shown on the homescreen.
Why Order a taxi for later Call-to-action? So, in my personal experience and a user behaviour I have seen from others (mostly friends), there are few instances when people schedule taxi pickup in some time. Some of those I came across:-
1). When you are getting ready, and book for a taxi 30mins later.
2). You just landed at the airport, and you book a taxi for 30mins later assuming you’ll be out of the airport in that time.
Taking in account of these use cases, I felt it would make justice to have schedule taxi booking with an equal importance along with the only CTA button existing on mytaxi now.
Exploration #3: A more compact quick preference selection
It was pretty much evident that the previous exploration may not work, as it takes a huge portion of the screen for just preferences. Considering these can also be never applied, or the same for all trips, a precious real estate was getting lost. So, I did a more compact UI for this.
With quick preferences, a user will be able to see quick results on the map (the taxis based on his preferences)
Exploration#4 : Keeping things simpler
A simpler preferences block; a different way of expanding and selecting from it.
Exploration #5: Keeping it inline with the existing design
Instead of opening a new full screen with toggle buttons for selection (and resulting in content under the fold), I experimented with the opening action of the existing Preferences selection. This would be an easier change, and an easier adoption for users who are used to the existing design.
Other Miscellaneous Explorations
When I was using the app, it showed a weaker GPS message on top. I didn’t notice it first, and the message was more like an easy miss, or rather something that can go unnoticed. But the sad part is that it covers the profile button and the fare details section on the map.
I changed the positioning of that message, or any other messaging to the bottom. This would ensure users see the message, and takes an action on them.
Reflections on my work here
What started out as a mere exploring of the app turned into to “How can I make this better?”. Compared to other case studies or tasks I have worked on previously, this was done in a very short period of time — about more than a week. Due to the time constraints I couldn’t work on prototype video animation as well.
I understand this work is solely based on my hypothesis, and having actual data would have helped me take wise decisions, but as a designer, working on hypothesis also helps when you don’t have data.
I hope you will enjoy going through the project as much as I enjoyed doing it. If you have any comments, please do share with me.
Thanks,
Prasil Lakshmanan
prasil@live.com
Find me: —
https://www.linkedin.com/in/prasillakshmanan/
https://dribbble.com/prasil
