Uber Carpooling Extension

Field: Tech
Type: School Project

Project Overview

Assume you and your pals are heading to a party in a different part of the city. You want to use Uber yet also save money and travel securely. Our ride-sharing feature made carpooling safer without additional fees. Enjoy your ride by taking it with your closest pals!

My Contributions

UX Research: Co-designed and spread out surveys and conducted user interviews.
UX Design: Paper prototype making, Lo-fi wireframes drawing and iteration of hi-fi prototype.

We noticed a lot of our friends paid a greater fee for extending a stop to pick up someone they know, while the other passengers are unable to locate the car in the allotted 3 minutes (as Uber does not allow stopping for more than 3 minutes). Furthermore, as college students, we typically choose the carpool option to save money. This may entail sharing transportation with strangers, which may present dangers. By providing a new capability to Uber, we tend to offer safety to the carpooling community.

Design Motivation

Optimizing pick up order

It is impossible in real life for users who request an Uber ride to always be the one who wishes to be picked up first.
When a request is placed, the optimal pickup order feature will automatically assist consumers in selecting the most time-efficient and cost-effective pickup order.

Adding friends through contacts

After connecting your contacts to Uber, you may choose friends from your contacts list. When selecting numerous friends, the profile will be displayed at the top bar to allow for faster adding and removing. Then, send out an invitation and wait for reaction from your friends!

Flexibility for user2

Your friend will get notified once you send out the invitation. They can edit and confirm their pickup point. Once they complete filling in the pickup point, Uber will find the nearby driver for you.

Visualization of the pickup process

Users may supervise the pickup process with an explicit notice and view the driver detail when the driver picks up users.

After collecting responses through surveys and conducted user interviews for their purpose and expectations about carpooling, here are some mostly raised issues.

User Research

Entertainment purpose

76.7% of responders reflecting entertainment is the main reason for a user to use the carpooling

Efficiency
‍
73.1% of all responders want to track the car and know the exact arrival time

Save money

91% of all responders reflecting they use carpooling to save money

Safety
‍
90.5% of all responders want to make sure they are safe when sharing ride with other people

Findings

Users have no control of what time they will be picked up when using “add stop” function
• Time-convenience is extremely crucial for employed passengers
• Pick up time need to be punctual

Users have no control of what people will they be paired with when taking an Uber pool
‍• Several female participants claimed that they would not take a shared ride at night.
• Most of the participants who does not like to use carpool function said that they don’t like to share a ride with strangers.

How might we help Uber pool users save money and commute safely to work or group activities？

According to the data, our target users are young individuals in their twenties who do not own a car but wish to travel with their friends safely.

User Persona

As we learn more about our users, we may move on to our rivals. We selected Lyft, Waze Carpool, and Scoop to assess each app's merits and limitations in order to design our new feature.

Competitive
Audit

We believe that expanding the Uberpool option to allow customers to choose who goes with them would be the most effective solution for our target audience. It enables users to carpool in real time with individuals they know and with certified drivers in areas where Waze and Scoop are not accessible. Our expanded Uberpool function ensures customer safety as well as cost-effectiveness.

We want to provide users additional alternatives by creating an A/B testing with two versions of the process.

Wireframe

Linear workflow that allow users to operate without returning to the same page

Parallelized setting up phases allow users to modify their information more easily.

To further understand user preferences, we invited three groups of target users to examine the paper prototype and share their thoughts and ideas.

User Testing

Findings

Reflection&Takeaway

Prepare multiple solutions
‍• Always provide several alternatives for users to pick from. Users' minds are constrained when there is just one answer. It assists people in exploring their ideas and offering additional guidance by providing numerous solutions.

Let users take control
• The more users feel in charge of the system, the more likely they are to be at ease with it. When faced with a decision, we must allow consumers to alter their minds or even cancel it instantly.

Balance innovation and convention
As designers, we are continuously striving to develop something new for our users. However, the influence of convention remains strong. During both the user research and testing stages, we discovered that people prefer the workflow/interface with which they are most comfortable, even if they like the new improvements. As a result, we did not put too much effort into reinventing the wheel. Instead, we spent more time studying the existing one and moving it forward.