Background

The idea of this project come from my personal experience. As an international student, I always suffer from the expensive cost of traveling from my apartment in Davis to the San Francisco Airport during every summer break and winter break. A single Uber/Lyft trip could cost me about $100 dollars or even more. Before moving forward to create an app, I decided to take a look at the current Ride-share/Transportation options for UCD students

— Ride hailing apps: Lyft and Uber

Requesting rides at any time is a huge advantage of ride hailing apps. So, students in Davis use Lyft and Uber for short distance rides around campus and the downtown area, but, the price for those ride-hailing platforms can get sky-high when traveling long distance. Lyft and Uber do not present themselves as affordable long distance transportation options for UCD students.

— Facebook UC Davis Ride Sharing Group

Another platform that currently exists for students to connect with rides is the Facebook Ride Sharing Group. Students there can either advertise that they have empty seats, or request to fill an empty seat in someone else’s ride. The Facebook group has over 30,000 members so far, and it has become the most preferred way for students to travel longer distances, from Davis to San Francisco or Los Angeles for example. The problem with this site is that Facebook is not designed for this use; the interface is not flexible which often results in a mess on the page itself. It is hard to navigate and track what rides are currently available and often when you post a request it gets lost amongst all the other posts. While the Facebook group works for many, we clearly see an opportunity area for an optimized user experience.

— Zimride

In our research on ride-sharing options for students, we were directed to a business called Zimride. Zimride was founded by to find a creative way to fill empty seats when people drove back home for the holidays. From our own analysis of Zimride, we noticed a few issues. Overall, its biggest problem seems to be that people don’t know about it. Those who are using it in Davis seem to be mostly students who commute everyday, and are looking for people to join them on their daily commute. This is a great goal, but it’s unclear how effective it is at matching people. It also doesn’t seem to be used for occasional trips or visits home, the way the Facebook page is used. One potential issue we also see is that there is no mobile app version of this service. We believe this may be of inconvenience to potential users, and may drive them away.

Design Process

— Empathize

After some informal “pilot interviews” with a couple friends who have used the services we were interested in learning more about, we designed a more extensive questionnaire (figure below) to hand out to a wider sample of friends who were part of our target population, to get more information on what parts of the existing services were problematic.

— Define

After reviewing the results of our surveys, we noticed a pattern of dissatisfaction with current ride sharing options which inspired us with ideas to recreate the ride-sharing experience to be more user friendly.

From our analysis, we found that convenience and affordability of transportation is important to students. Students commented on the difficulty of finding convenient ride shares, saying “it is hard to find [a ride share] at a suitable time, for example coming from the airport”, and “ It takes a lot of time to find a ride that fits your needs”. It is difficult to sort rides based on time or location, and it’s not always clear which ride postings still have availability, so riders must message several drivers, hoping one still has a spot. They also noted that other options aren’t always affordable. One student said: “I’ve had to take an Uber once to the airport and it cost me $200, which is completely out of my budget, but I had no other option”. Drivers also noted that no-shows were a big inconvenience when planning rides. One interviewee said: “One time when I posted as a driver leaving from Davis to San Diego, I had someone not show up at the pick up location and not communicate their cancellation”. In these situations, the drivers lose out on money that was meant to offset their gas costs, and potential riders miss an opportunity for an open spot. 

Another theme we noticed was that students appreciate the safety ride-sharing provides. Students appreciated that “[the Facebook ride share page] feels safe because we are all coming from the same UCD community”. But other students felt there was still more to be had in terms of safety, saying “I wish I could know more background on the individual who is driving”.

— Ideate

We decided to design a mobile interface for a phone app. We believe this is the best option for our users, because students on the go may not have their laptops with them when they travel, but are likely to have their phones. Storyboard below shows the target users we had in mind while beginning to design our app. After reflecting on the survey results and users’ needs, we decided on the features that we want our app to provide.

— Prototype

After making note of all the features we wanted, we made a flowchart of how we wanted some of these features to flow together. Based on this flowchart, we then developed our high-fidelity prototype on Adobe Xd.

— High Fidelity Prototype in Adobe XD