Team: Lauren Outhabong, Kimberly Tran, Micah Alon, Riju Narang (PM)

Timeline: April 2022 - May 2022

The project was prompted by Design Interactive, an on-campus UX organization that hosts a 6-week cohort sprint every Fall and Spring. Our team was awarded with the "Best Prototype" and "Audience Choice" awards.

We were tasked with designing an app that aids all of the pain points university students have when using the "UC Davis Rideshare" Facebook group. We followed a human-centered design process, working through iteration after iteration of app structure and visuals. At the end of our sprint, we were given the opportunity to present our final prototype to guest judges who are UX Designers at Netflix, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

I led my team through our High-Fidelity sprint where we were able to finalize the overall structure of our app and wireframes based on our "How Might We?" statements. In addition, I worked alongside my team to conduct User Research, Usability Testing, User Experience Design, and Prototyping.

To start off, our team conducted literature reviews to become familiar with the different platforms that exist for ridesharing. While the top apps in the ride-share industry are Uber and Lyft, university students may gravitate towards cheaper options when traveling longer distances.

Since we were prompted to gain inspiration from the UC Davis Ride-Share Facebook Group, we focused our attention on platforms made solely for the use of students. Our main research goal:

A total of 79 university students were surveyed, 68.8% of which had used the UC Davis Ridesharing group or a similar platform. Below is our research synthesis and affinity mapping.

Communication between riders and drivers is difficult and frustrating, especially due to having to switch between multiple apps to keep track of messages and/or payments.

Searching for riders/drivers that match one’s preferences is time-consuming and confusion.

The establishment of trust between riders and drivers gives students a sense of safety, which is also why current users gravitated toward university rideshare platforms.

The bolded keywords represent common themes that our research participants expressed value in.

Streamline communication between drivers and riders about ride details?

Create an intuitive way to filter for driver/rider preferences?

Allow for flexible prices for riders/wages for riders?

Establish a sense of trust between riders and drivers?

Using these statements, my teammates and I all took the time to indivisually sketch out low-fidelity wireframes. The approach we took was to create frames for each of the statements in order to solve each painpoint. 

We found that we had a lot of similar ideas for features that we wanted to include in our app. While it's obvious to fix the pain points of miscommunication with a chat feature or manage preferences with a filter, we kept a few things in mind when deciding on how to implement them.

We continuously questioned why users would use a particular feature and how we could make it the most efficient. For example, although a feature for group chats might seem very straightforward, we wanted to consider how it might be used by people participating in a ride-share. Some questions that come to mind are "Who is in charge of adding or deleting people from the chat? Could this be automatic" or "Should the driver have more control over the chat settings in case there's a change of plans?". After discussing our common solutions, we decided on 7 features to highlight. 

University Onboarding - Users sign up with their college-issued student ID to ensure that only current students can use the platform.

2. User Profile - Users can link their social media and add interests to personalize and allow others to see mutual connections

3. Filter for Ride Preferences - When searching for rides, users can customize preferences for pick-up & drop-off location, date, time, and price.

4.  Requesting to Join a Ride - After picking a driver, riders request to join the trip. Once the driver has accepted them, the user is automatically added to a group chat with the other riders and the driver. If the user wanted to message another rider privately, they would click on their profile and send a message.

5.  All the Important Information in One Place(Dashboard) - On the Dashboard, users can find their pending requests, current rides, and past rides all in one place. There will also be a section for announcements, where users will be reminded about payments, chat messages, etc. They can also see and scroll through the explore page.

6. Explore Page - Ask If riders can not find a ride after filtering and looking through driver options, they can post with a description of what they are looking for, and this post will be listed on the explore page. The explore page can be sorted to show either ride offers or requests for rides. 

7. Leave Reviews on your Driver or Passengers Profile - Users can heart drivers and riders they enjoyed interacting with. After a ride is complete, users can also leave a review.

-> Students feel safe using the UCD shuttle because it's run by the school and has a sense of credibility

-> Safety was the most important aspect for 2/3 of the Facebook Rideshare users

Emphasizes the sense of trust built around university ride sharing by using college-specific authentication at sign-up. This ensures that the app is being used by students only.