Uber Social
Category: Transportation
Purpose: Accessibility and prioritized safety while ride sharing
Team: Milap Patel and Yvonne Wang
Overview
Uber Social is an expanded feature implemented into the current mobile application to bring a new social aspect to users. I focused on the lack of convenience and curiosity that individuals have when others are ride-sharing.
— — —
The Problem and the Business
With everything going remote, individuals lack the opportunity to stay up to date with their acquaintances’ travel plans which makes it difficult to stay connected and schedule meet-ups. Moreover, Uber has focused on the individual rider experience but not much regarding their friends or family.
Uber currently has a global network of more than 75 million riders with more than 4 million drivers. Of these Users, 65% of users are between the ages of 16–34. There is a huge opportunity to target this user segment through a more convenient and social centered feature given their interest in what others are doing because they are focused on socializing with their friends and family by going to concerts, nights out, and late night activities. As social media continues to take a dominant stance in users’ lives, an opportunity to leverage by integrating friends and connections into Uber presents itself.
Users are able to stay up to date on their friends and family when riding with Uber through being able to follow rides in real-time and being able to notify others when on route.
This would result in increased revenue from an increase in rides booked, user satisfaction rates, and engagement (see metrics).
The Solution
Promoting a social aspect through sharing ride history updates with friends and family, which will encourage user engagement on the platform. Moreover, creating prioritized notifications based on user preferences for transportation updates as users leave and arrive will give users an ability to view others’ travel plans.
Metrics
This feature is focusing on two main metrics; increasing user engagement and users acquired. Both metrics will contribute to improving overall user usage for the application and the following metrics are suggested to be tracked once the feature is implemented.
User Engagement Metrics: Monthly active users is expected to increase dramatically given that both of these features will contribute to that goal. Firstly, the duration of user sessions on the application will increase as a direct result of the social addition to rides. Moreover, the engagement expected from the older user segment will also increase from the additional time spent tracking and following rides.
Users Acquired Metrics: Focusing on the user segment (aged from 16–34), individuals are constantly curious as to what others are doing from the other social media in their lives. Introducing an ability to learn what others are up to will increase monthly users acquired and increase the overall user base. Introducing an option for users to input how (word-of-mouth, referrals, etc) they learned about Uber would be an important metric to track to determine future marketing efforts to continue to target this user segment.
Goals
- Help users stay engaged and involved with up to date travel plans from their friends and family.
Understanding the Idea
Diving into Uber’s current application and features, it is focusing on giving each customer a successful and efficient. ride-sharing experience. Moreover, safety when riding with Uber is targeted at two main points: Firstly, information regarding the vehicle and driver and secondly, passengers are able to contact emergency assistance if needed. The Uber application that currently brings an entire safety toolkit to users which can be accessed throughout the ride-sharing experience. Uber also offers a link to send to friends, however, this is often forgotten by the customer and is not the most convenient option for riders. If this feature is implemented, this link would be taken off the application in an act to replace it with a more efficient and simple way to perform this action. Therefore, I wanted to target the safety and social aspects of Uber.
Research & Methodology
User Research
Through a series of interviews with current Uber users, I discovered the following issues:
- A reason to open the Uber application for more than just ride booking on a monthly basis
- Interested in learning what others are doing via ride tracking, travel plans and acquaintances
From a group of 50 people (age range of 18–30, 55% female, 45% male)
43% of users said it would be interesting to see where friends are traveling or have plans for over the weekend
- “Find My Friends is nice but just isn’t accurate or helpful enough to keep me updated on when my friends are getting to my house”
- “I’d want to see where my friends are Ubering too”
62% of users said they would use this feature to book group plans or meet up with friends last minute
- “If I could view where my friends are on a Friday night, I would totally take an Uber and meet up with them”
- “I could easily see this being popular among the younger audience”
From the representation of Uber users interviewed, it was discovered that the main problems or opportunities when it comes to ride-sharing with Uber lie within one main area, the social aspect. As a result, the design was meant to create something that could make Uber users feel excited by better integrating their social life with their use of the Uber app.
A challenge encountered was not knowing some of Uber’s existing features that overlapped with our ideas, such as the linked family account option that allows users to track loved ones via a shared link. The user interviews helped gain insight into how popular these features are among our target demographic.
Personas
This Uber feature targets secondary and post-secondary students, who will enjoy being able to share their travel plans and receive updates from their friends. The user persona gives an overview of the target demographics.
Use Cases
Student: Spring Break has just started and Adam, a freshman in college, doesn’t have plans but wants to spend the night with some friends. He opens the Uber app and finds where his friends are headed for the night. He lets them know that he’s on his way. Following this conversation, he tags his friends on the ride and they all meet up together to enjoy the rest of the night.
Based on these Use Cases, a User Flow (below) was developed to outline the additions to the current user flow that an Uber user takes.
Development and Design
Design System
When designing this integration, I followed the Uber Design System found on Uber’s website, using black as the primary colour. The phone number verification and social sharing pages were designed to resemble existing Uber screens.
Screens
Risks
This new feature adds to the core flow of allowing users to take a ride, something that may become more of a clutter to the experience. Therefore, there are a couple risks that should be kept in mind before moving on with this feature. Firstly, users will have privacy concerns regarding their location being tracked and shown. To combat this concern, Uber should emphasize the opt-in/opt-out screens. Upon opting into the launch of this feature, users will have to toggle this feature to active which will make it clear as to what they are enabling access to and how to disable access for it. Additionally, if there is negativity around the feature Uber will face a dramatic decrease in engagement. Upon the launch of this feature, the product team should be very cautious of social trends and user engagement.
Go-To-Market Strategy
An A/B test with 2 groups should be conducted and users observations regarding their activity and engagement should be monitored. Uber will see a significant increase in engagement from Group A (with the updated feature) given that friends within this group also have the update and are posting travel plans. On the other hand, will not see an increase in engagement based on the groups average activity.
We should start to roll the feature out in major cities, San Francisco being the highest spending city based on the money ride sharers are spending. Geographically, the feature should continue to be sent to 2 high usage cities in North America on a weekly basis. Following this, the feature should be grown to the user base by 4% per week once major cities are targeted.
Resources
“Uber Help.” Uber, 2020, https://help.uber.com/riders
“Uber Revenue and Usage Statistics (2020).” Business of Apps, 29 Aug. 2020, www.businessofapps.com/
data/uber-statistics/.
“Uber.” Uber, 2020, https://www.uber.com
I’m a rising junior at UC Davis studying Managerial Economics, Computer Science, and Technology Management. I would love to hear any feedback or critique you may have!
Given my intentions to explore different design tools in product design, this project was created with Figma.
