Buddy Driver

💫 My Role

Worked closely with my senior product designer (design review) , front-end developer, Product Manager and CTO. This was a concise limited-time project. There was not a lot of ample time to do user research. However, there were many rounds of feedback from the stakeholders and iterations to get the app design approval quickly.

⚡ Timeline

April 2021 - Design concepts and meeting with stakeholders

May 2021- Buddy Driver release to Trevo app

Buddy driver where you book a personal driver for yourself

What is interesting about Buddy Driver, despite its service from Socar, it’s only available in Trevo. Trevo is an app that rent’s out a host’s car for the day or more but for Buddy Driver, it’s more towards renting a personal driver for your car within the day.

You can learn more about Buddy Driver through this website as well!

https://buddydriver.my/

Competitor Analysis

Grab (Hire)

Note: Hire is available for GrabCar Premium and GrabCoach driver-partners only.

Uber (Hourly)

Note: Uber hourly is actually almost similar to SOCAR’s available service which is SOCAR+

First, I would need to make it easy for our users to select the location, time, and type of car they would like to choose. As they are using their car, it’s to let the personal driver know what type of car they're riding to ensure the perfect personal driver can drive it. After discussing with the business team, this is the flow that we can come up with.

Booking a personal driver for your car user flow

Before I deep-dived into the designs, I made the first iteration of wireframes to present to the stakeholders. When I first started with the wireframes, I was determined to follow the style guide of the Trevo app so that it wouldn’t look too different. However, despite most of the stakeholders agreeing to it, the CEO was not impressed. He wanted the app to be more intuitive. Most of the flows and experience were alright, it was just more towards the design aesthetic that he wanted.

Looking back at the competitor analysis, I realized how UI looked formal compared to the others. I was too focused on making sure the components were reused, I was afraid of exploring different designs. However, all is not lost. After exploring more about the high-fidelity concepts, everyone finally was happy with the final design.

Guests are now able to add in the date and time more easily. The visibility of the price will help them decide whether the journey is worth it. They are also able to check the benefits of having a buddy driver if it fits their need. The calendar and the pick-up time will be auto-filled to the latest available time making it swifter and faster to select the duration.

Inspired by Uber, guests frequently comment on the route's distance and express a desire to view the distance to the destination

As Buddy Driver is one of the services available in the Trevo app, any host from the app that already has listings, can simply integrate their car listings into Buddy Driver. If the car has been booked by another guest, the car will be disabled.

Location tracking of your driver is now available in the Trevo app. Making it easier for the guest to contact and monitor the journey taken.

This was the first time, I had a dilemma in following the design system or breaking the mold. After several feedbacks, I realized the pages themselves looked too boring and were not that memorable in doing the booking.

I aimed to conduct in-depth research on guests and hosts interested in this service. Yet, time constraints led me to rely on competitor analyses and stakeholder feedback

I was pretty much ecstatic to be able to work on a different platform other than Dash. I learned a lot about the structure as well as more in-depth about Trevo’s design system as well.

Once the buddy driver marketing begins to start, they target Bangsar to collect feedback and provide free drinks. A lot of people came and tried out the Buddy Driver app. So far they have given good feedback and how easy to use it.

Some Improvements in the future:

Selecting a location is slightly confusing but they got a hang of it after a while. Need to consider drunk users using the app.

You can also check out this post about buddy driver that was featured in a Vulcan post :)

Up to date on the 4th of August 2022, Buddy driver has finally reached up to 3k completed jobs in July. It has been appearing in a lot of media in Malaysia and a lot of users have grown to love it.

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