Production Line #1: Key Features of Volt Lines for 2018-Q3
Hi there! This is Product Manager of Volt Lines speaking. Hope you are having a good day with good vibes.
To share our good vibes with you and turn Volt Lines’ Product Engineering team’s experiences and learning into helpful guides, especially for the “shared mobility” communities of the world, we decided to publish regular blog posts related to our Product and Engineering processes. Since this one is the first of a hopefully long-lasting series of these posts on Product side (See our first post on Engineering side here, written by Baran, our Head of Engineering), I hope it’ll be easy to understand the context and if it’s not, I’ll receive some helpful feedback to improve it. Let’s roll!
Key Features of Volt Lines products for Q3
Our priorities for Q3 on product side are mostly shaped up after our third customer, who joined us on late-Q2, since they brought the biggest number of users and made it easier for us to see the use cases more clearly. After we had a couple of heavy issues that we never experienced before, we clearly saw that we need:
- Performance and UX improvements on the driver app to make it more user-friendly for our drivers and collect the trip data continuously,
- to get ready for numerous-lines per zone,
- A bottleneck-killing approach on operational processes to increase our operations team’s efficiency,
- A smooth “first day of using Volt Lines’ services” experience both for our operations team, employers, drivers, and employees,
- And a transaction logging system for monitoring everything and sustaining the customer-level transparency.
Let’s go into details.
1. Performance and UX improvements on our driver app.
After we learned charging the phone that is always awake while having a live trip sometimes causes heating issues on driver’s devices, we optimized our real-time location update system, minimized the location data and developed a map-caching mechanism. Those three improvements leaded us to have optimized API endpoints and a smarter data usage method on the client side, and very less heated devices for our drivers as a result.
On UX level, we realized what we need to do immediately after observing our middle-aged drivers: After we saw that one of our drivers changed the punto of our app to the highest option by using a native Android feature just to read more easily, we had a new version only for getting the punto bigger than usual.
That helped a lot later: This case lead us to use visuality rather than words, for everything we are aiming to make it highlighted on our driver app.
One more example for UX improvements on the driver app is showing the passenger names one by one, aside from showing them all on a list. This led drivers to see only the next passenger, and her pick up or drop off point on the map. Also worked for making the thinking process simpler for our drivers.
Moral of the Story: Field testing is everything in a culture that does not even have a translation for the word “feedback”.
2. Getting ready for numerous-lines per zone.
Since our business model is built on the value of increasing the number of total service lines and frequencies of them for a company, it creates a high-acceleration on the number of users and lines after a new company joins. That’s why changing the destination of an evening trip on the passenger app is one of our core features: employees need to see and benefit from the lines that are in Volt Lines network. We got ready for the use cases of changing the destination from home to another location on an evening trip, and made the first step to make Volt Lines network on-demand.
3. A bottleneck-killing approach on operational processes.
We got smarter on our operational technology stack. The deal was: If it’s taking a certain amount of time to do it manually, make it automatic. We had built many successful features since then, including a hacked-for-good relational database tool to make real-time operational changes, a bunch of in-house algorithms for determining service stops per line, grouping a line’s employees, sequencing them and creating the most efficient route for them.
Now we are able to create a new route, add a new employee to a route or change one of the employee’s current route under 30 seconds.
4. A smooth “first day of using Volt Lines’ services” experience.
After employers requested to see how many minutes their employees’ routes taking, how many meters they are walking or how much detouring they are before the service operation starts, we created an export tool to show the route of every line and passenger into minor details. To inform drivers and employees about their trips before the first day of operations, we developed a feature named “Sneak Peek” among the team: that shows the route, pick up and drop off points and times to the passengers and drivers. Both personas are able to give us feedback to make us change any unpractical thing and improve our overall service quality.
5. A transaction logging system.
Since we dealt with a couple of cases that could disturb our operational quality and data collection duties, we started logging everything related to a trip, and boosted it with driver gamification since the driver app is our flagship. The output significantly improved our internal and external needs: Employers are able to see any past trips’ details that their passengers joined, and we are able to take quick actions if any disturbance on operations happens.
If you read through here, you are the best! Thank you for your time and interest. We are planning to write those posts more and more in time. Keep on being updated by following our blog, and please share your thoughts in comments or DM. See you around!
