Good UX Is Making Things That Matter
Or Why I’m an Uber Fanboy
User experience (UX) is not a deliverable like user flows or wireframes. UX is not a checklist of best practices. At its core, UX is a deeply humanist philosophy that puts people ahead of faceless organizations. There cannot be “good” UX behind products that don’t offer some deeply human value to the individuals that will use them.
But conversely, an app or website that solves a real-world, human problem will always have value even if it breaks standard UX precedents. Case in point, consider Uber.
When looking at the digital presence of Uber, the brand hardly nails all of its UX details. For example on the Uber website menu, the language selector is inaccessible becuase it’s coverd by oversized CTA thumbnails prompting the user to download the Uber app on either iTunes or Google Play. This is hardly ideal UX.
But I would argue that Uber is still one of the pre-eminent practitioners of UX. The essence of Uber as an app and as a business is about recognizing and responding to pain points in the traditional customer experience of using cabs.
The first challenge with the old model is getting a taxi in the first place. In many cities (aka places that are not New York), the streets aren’t exactly teeming with cabs waiting to be hailed. This means you must call a cab company, talk to a dispatcher and then wait an indeterminate time for them to send you your cab. All of this is a gigantic waste of time, and if you’re in an unfamiliar city you’re unlikely to have the phone number of the nearest taxi company. So enter Uber, which lets you hail a car and set your location via a mobile app with no awkward phone calls to disinterested dispatchers.
A second pain point of the traditional taxi experience is paying for your cab. Many cabbies are reluctant to accept credit cards. And even when they do, they seldom have their card terminals actually activated. So instead they take a rubbing of your card and write down your credit card numbers. Now I don’t know about you, but I am generally opposed to giving strangers a copy of my credit card to bill at later date at their convenience. Uber streamlines payment for the rider by requiring users to have a credit card on file with them, which will be charged for each ride. That means no having to carry cash and no payment snafus. It also ensures that drivers don’t have to worry about passengers trying to dip out and avoid paying for their ride.
A third issue with the traditional cab model is the drivers themselves. Now I personally have never had any major issues with a cab driver, and I would assume that the majority of them are like any other professional group — decent human beings who are reasonably competent at their job. However, when you hail a cab you have no idea what sort of person you’re going to be getting. Will they be a good and safe driver? Will they be honest and take you the most direct route to your destination? Under the traditional taxi model, you just don’t know. But enter Uber, and you know you’re getting a good driver. After every Uber ride is complete, Uber prompts the user to rate the driver on a scale of 1-5 stars. Uber only retains those drivers who average above a 4-star rating.
The components of Uber are not earth shattering. It’s essentially a combination of location-based mapping, online payments and online reviews. But the brand found a way to apply these existing solutions to pain points in the customer experience of cabbing that had been in place for so long that they were taken as givens. And in doing so, Uber has disrupted an entire industry that hasn’t evolved in decades, building a strong position in the market as a result.
As agencies and brands increasingly adopt UX as a discipline, the challenge is not to get wrapped up in deliverables and details. Wireframes, user flows and best practice checklists are pointless deliverables and mere buzzword fodder if we don’t use them to deliver an experience that offers actual value to the end user.
