Humanizing Public Mobility Experiences| What’s Up with Ride Sharing?
I believe that small unstructured businesses meeting system design would create efficient, frictionless transactions between both beneficiaries.
About the same time last year, I was to do a project on structuring an ad-hoc rickshaw hailing service run by a local aggregator which worked something like this …
The responsibility of the aggregator extends far beyond just coordinating with the driver and sending the rickshaw on time, it deals with cancelling of trips and lost items and multiple feedback calls for the location of the rickshaw and the ETA for arrival. But all of these are problems that the digital communicative ledger has solved.
Where the digital platform currently suffers, in my opinion, is the pooling of rides for the convenience of both drivers and commuters.
The flow
The first screen has consistent interaction with users who want to book the ride for a location other their own current one.
The last screen is the Confirmation screen. You’re set to go for a ride where four strangers stare at their phones for the duration of their ride.
The above are screenshots of the basic app interfaces I viewed
They still include the same simple flows invoking the same old money saving emotion that we attach to most other products and services that buying in bulk and sharing is cheaper than buying smaller units of the same.
What if we could attach a different emotion to the same problem to give a sense of interaction and treating others as people with dreams and lives that could interest you and that you would help them out if chance had it that way. This could be the next step after moving into a momentary-ownership/ non-purchase behaviour economy especially in this sector.
The following personas were studied
- The Aggregator
- The Driver
- The Rider
Scale does not equal success
Entered the business to fend for the family. Has complete local language proficiency plus the ability to communicate with his customers amicably.
Make a comfortable living
Wants to put his child through good schooling and earn enough to recover past debts. Entirely dependent on the aggregator for business. Would be able to guide students around town with ease since he’s a local.
Ride easy, ride cheap.
Heard about the aggregation service from his friend circle. He makes the drivers wait for a bit before arrival, has no loyalty or attachment to the service providers, lives in a community and knows more or less everyone by face but never had the chance to interact. Has severe language problems in the city of residence since he shifted here for work.
Communal Behavior Facilitation
What if there was a way to get people to care about who they ride with rather than placing them like pieces into a carton that carts them somewhere they’re headed?
This thought leads to the birth of the community feature in the app, but how do you approach such a problem? with combined irony and paradox the solution to the problem was in the approach of approaching.
I looked at how the competitors presented pooled rides in daily interactions which is by maintaining the same hierarchy throughout to show that their other services are available at your whim too and they’re no less important than pooling. As you swipe through the pages the only cue you get is to save money like you’re getting an extra bottle of juice for every bottle of juice you buy. Sounds old and compelling for the wrong reasons right? you should want juice because you want juice and not because it was cheap. Our brain probably receives the same amount of stimulation from these cues.
I found it kind of sad that the wonderful inner architecture of society has developed to the extent of trusting a stranger to get you to where you want to go and stopping for other strangers to hop in to do the same without feeling the threat of being murdered and all through these magic bricks that we hold so dearly to are acting as obstructions in human interactions all while it is possible to share their story while they commute (the only time of the day they actually are restricted to a physical space) and weave a bond deeper than superficial information sharing and likes and in the process save collective resources.
And yet we dose ourselves with more information to keep the consciousness busy about one topic or the other like taking a hit of a highly addictive drug where happiness is dependent on when or how much of the hit is taken.
What if only the number of people travelling, time and destination were asked and the rest was handled by the app? and the driver had the right to choose the ride he took based on the community rating which was a cumulative score of co-passengers and drivers given to an individual.
Again there is seemingly nothing new but the same information when taken and rearranged in a hierarchy would be extremely valuable to customers.
Towards sharing lives and rides.
Just how many of us?
There is a Japanese study on the usage of excessive plastic bags in which they found that just asking neutral questions to people regarding their daily decision, significantly affected how their choices. A neutral reminder of whether we need to use the things we do. So, a gentle neutral question to check if we really need what we’re asking for will really help shape our daily decision. The theory of planned behaviour sheds light on our intentions and perceived control over them and from there roots the ideology of neutral choice-making.
Simple Decisions.
Just two things, tell me where and when. I’ll let you know how much it costs.
Notice that the action buttons are equally weighted for a neutral question.
A suggestive list of places people around us travel to can be fetched from the database and displayed. Thus 3 simple clicks will help us get details from the commuter with great ease, less than 12 seconds are spent on this page but it still facilitates the major decision a consumer takes in the journey.
The last Interaction simply gives options of other people who have listed themselves up as community riders and are open to riding with someone, and if they don’t happen to go to the other community member’s destination, they can list themselves up as open rides and ask for someone else to ride with them.
The last interaction directs us towards a DM and the other rider gets a request for them to accept or reject, which forms familiarity and sparks the conversation of where they want to go, conversation prompts like “what route will you take?” or something would make it easier for users to converse with each other.
Thus, with a simple facilitation infrastructure, we can channelize intention and create a better ride experience.
Thank you so much for reading through, hope you liked it!
