Designing products in ways that can help minimize distraction

By Nadia Anderson, Public Policy, Road and Traffic Safety

In addition to showers, Spring also brings a renewed focus on ways to reduce driver distraction. Every day in the U.S. more than 8 lives are lost on the road due to distracted driving. You may have seen people surf the internet and post to social media while they drive. It’s important that we all work together to help ensure that distractions that take our focus off the road are kept to a minimum.

Distraction is a safety challenge for all drivers on the road. We think that technology can help.

Designing products in ways that can minimize distraction.

At Uber, we’re working to help raise public awareness and exploring ways to reduce manual, visual and cognitive distraction. Today, we are sharing our early thinking about driver distraction and a few of the steps that we have taken:

• Our recently announced redesigned navigation experience includes features that can help reduce interaction with the app. With just one tap, turn-by-turn directions begin.
• Our navigation also automatically begins showing the best route for the next trip. Information is already populated, which can help reduce the need to think about what’s next.
• We recently launched Night Mode for our in-app navigation feature to help reduce eye strain. At night, the navigation screen changes to a darker set of colors designed to reduce glare and eye strain while remaining as easy-to-read as during daytime driving.
• We continue to explore uses of telematics and rider feedback to give tips to drivers about mounting their phones. These tips help, and many drivers who previously hadn’t mounted their phone began doing so.

We join road safety stakeholders who are using this time of the year to focus on ways to reduce distracted driving. There’s much more work to do and we will continue to invest in ways to use technology to help make roads safer for everyone.