How to create a user experience for a carpool app?

This translation is my favorite kind of side dishes, short space, strong combat. The original author is Frog, an interactive designer, who describes some of the challenges and solutions that she and friends have encountered in designing and developing the iphone client for carpool services Ridejoy. Foreplay here, into the body.

Ridejoy Carpool service after a few months on the web side of the online operation, we have a clearer understanding of the current user base. And for Ridejoy's iphone app, we want it to be more than just a porting version of the site, it could be a new user experience that is more in line with the mobile context.

Based on this product approach, we identified three key challenges:

How can drivers and passengers be encouraged to post more information?

How to quickly and effectively help drivers and passengers to match?

How can the drivers and passengers who have been matched be more effective in completing the engagement?

　　Challenge 1: Encourage users to post information

A great deal of information on carriage and ride is the foundation of a successful carpool service. According to our understanding, there are a few people who drive alone now and those who are looking for low-cost rides, but if they are not interested in releasing their demand information through Ridejoy applications, then the so-called match and the whole carpool service will be impossible to talk about.

To mobilize the enthusiasm of users, we must let users fully understand the "carpool" activities can bring their value and benefits.

First, we analyzed what the drivers usually do to launch carpool activities and make a list of these reasons. Next, I (the original author) mapped out some simple sketches of the list, which would have the potential to meet the needs of the driver's function and content of the preliminary outline. Then, we will discuss these sketches and evaluate the 5 concepts that we think are the most feasible in the Wireframe prototype, and show some target users (drivers alone) to verify our assumptions with their feedback.

In the end, we found that the following 3 factors played an important role in driving the car-pooling activity:

The image of the person (photo)

Number of potential passengers

Money gain

This round of research and validation ultimately helped us design the "hot-popular destinations" process for the current product. Users can browse to areas with the most car-pooling needs, as well as the personal data of motorists and passengers who are destined for these areas. Information in these areas can be most effective and "motivate" users to make judgments when the user has not yet determined the journey or is determined whether to initiate a carpool activity.

　　Challenge 2: Speed up matching

People don't like to wait, and we have to help motorists and commuters to find information that matches their needs more quickly and efficiently. In the Ridejoy version of the service, we realize that the more complete the information the user fills in when they initiate a carpool, the more efficient the match. The problem is that users who use mobile clients simply do not want or have time to fill in the full details.

To solve this problem, we first list the information that motorists and passengers may be willing to fill out. After several discussions, we finally identified 4 required information and provided some more flexible settings. For example, the date of departure is the information that the user must fill out when initiating an activity, where the user can specify a specific date or a time period; the second method is especially suitable for users who have not yet finalized the schedule.

In addition, carpool is different from other modes of transportation, users will not only focus on the time and destination information when browsing the activity information list, but also care about the other passengers who take the same car. To this end, we also allow users to fill in this additional information when initiating an activity. Do you like the quiet or the busy journey? Are you a member of a AAA card, or do you need WiFi? Perfecting these information will further speed up the match between the initiator and the participant.

　　Challenge 3: To facilitate the completion of the agreement

Carpool is a kind of informal, based on the activities of the participants spontaneous execution, the whole process will often appear a variety of problems. When a person finds a suitable line and the associated carpool activity, he or she needs to communicate with the driver frequently through telephone or SMS. As a trusted third party service provider, we have the responsibility to integrate this function into the application, so that the follow-up communication between users more intensive standardization.

The question-and-answer session between activity participants is not avoidable, and what we need to do is to provide some means of simplifying the communication process. No one wants to see one side quit the carpool plan after a lengthy communication and preparation.

To this end, I refer to some other collaborative consumption (collaborative consumption) types of application products, such as Airbnb and Yardsale, and so on. After experimenting with a variety of processes and interface layouts, we decided to adopt a lightweight validation sequence mechanism, which is similar to the familiar short message interface. Both motorists and passengers can initiate confirmation, for example, after the trip, once the passengers have completed the payment, the driver received the money, the car-pooling activities will be confirmed.

The confirmation process can occur between multiple people and even multiple journeys, for example, you can pick up a passenger to Los Angeles and then take another two different passengers back, the entire activity can be controlled through a set of confirmation process.

This mechanism leads to the design of the dashboard (dashboard) in the final product, where users can view all their travel, reminders, confirmations, and other information.

　　What have we learned?

These are some of the biggest challenges we have faced in the design of user experience in Ridejoy applications. In the process, I learned something important:

　　1. Prototype-test-prototype-test:

Our team spends a lot of time talking about user needs, and propose the corresponding candidate solution, and then through the Wireframe prototype and high-fidelity Interactive prototype and real user Exchange test, explore the user's actual needs, verify our assumptions, make corresponding changes, and continue to carry out such an iterative cycle.

　　2, gradually explore the interactive mode:

We tried different kinds of navigation patterns during the design process, such as tab bar, Sidebar (Sidebar), Dashboard (Dashboard), and so on. We sketched each pattern, nailed it to the wall, and ran the entire pattern of process scripts down to discuss which patterns would bring the best experience for Ridejoy.

　　3, deliver the design draft:

As a hope in a variety of details to achieve the perfect designer, I really have a lot of entanglements in this respect, I do not know whether the user can understand the current design, I do not know "currently not participate in any carpool activities," the interface is also optimized space ... No matter when, in the mind always feel that there are some things can be adjusted. But the project has its own output and iteration rhythm, it is very important to grasp the time point of delivery of the design draft.