HuskyRide
(Husky) Pack Your Ride!
Team
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Problem and Design Overview
At UW, the high volume of student who commute to school contribute to problems such as severe traffic congestions, rising transportation costs, and increased environmental damage. Carpooling is a great option to alleviate these issues, but students, especially newcomers who do not have an established social network at UW yet, may find it challenging to seek compatible carpool buddies due to different class schedules and safety concerns. Thus, many students avoid this by just opting to drive alone, which causes them to miss out on carpooling incentives UW provides, worsens traffic, and contradicts with UW’s commitment to environmental sustainability.
The carpool matching system mobile application is designed to organize and facilitate carpooling arrangements for both drivers and riders. This application enables users to reduce transportation costs and foster new connections through finding compatible carpooling groups and splitting transportation costs. Users can quickly sign up and verify their identity using UW for existing community as a step towards safety, find nearby carpool groups, and begin carpooling.
Logo of the app HuskyRide.
Design Walkthrough
Our resulting design is a carpool matching system mobile application crafted to facilitate carpooling arrangements for both drivers and riders, with a focus on convenience, and flexibility. By connecting users within the UW community, the app encourages cost-effective transportation and builds social connections through compatible carpool groups. It effectively addresses common carpooling challenges, such as late arrivals and unexpected delays, by incorporating features like grace period timers, alternative arrangements for delayed drivers, and options for riders to quickly find new carpool options when needed. This comprehensive design ensures a seamless, reliable, and user-friendly carpooling experience for everyone involved.
Our two primary tasks appeared as follows:
Rider Delay Exception Handling
Task 1 allows for flexible management of delays at the pickup location, ensuring both drivers and riders have a fair system for handling tardiness. When the driver arrives, a grace period timer begins, giving the rider a specified amount of time to show up. If the timer expires, the driver can choose to cancel the ride or extend the grace period in minute-long increments. This task provides a structured way to manage delays while offering both parties the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen circumstances.
Increasing grace period for a late rider
Driver Delay Exception Handling
Task 2 ensures flexibility and options for riders when a driver is delayed. If the driver encounters a delay, the rider can choose to either continue waiting or seek an alternative carpool. Once the delayed driver arrives at the rider’s location, the pre-selected timer set by the driver will begin, providing a clear and structured timeline for the pickup process. This task helps maintain efficiency and transparency while accommodating unforeseen disruptions.
Finding a new carpool for a late driver
Design Research and Key Insights
Our design research aimed to gain insights into how commuter students currently plan and organize their carpooling arrangements and what key factors motivate or deter students from choosing carpooling as their mode of transportation. Our research method is to conduct two types of interviews, specifically targeting those who have experience carpooling or are currently doing so. Each interview aims to gain more individualized, in-depth insights into their commuting habits, carpool preferences, and any perceived barriers to carpooling. For all interviews, a semi-structured interview style was used to ensure consistency while also allowing participants the freedom to express their thoughts in detail.
Convenience in pickup and punctuality are important for ideal carpooling.
Our initial understanding of an ideal carpooling situation was limited to pickup locations being close to one another and matching based on similar schedules. This insight we gained from one of our interviews showed us that punctuality and trust were also a key factor in an ideal carpooling situation. One interviewee noted that “making sure time is established and they are punctual” is an important factor in continuing a carpool arrangement. This insight gave us a lead on a potential design task we could focus on, which was handling riders who were running late or were consistently late.
Early sketch of alternative options to proceed for late rider
People are more motivated to carpool with others they know.
Initially, the concept of carpooling seemed very similar to UberPool or any rideshare application. Users receive a carpooling arrangement based on location and estimated time of arrival. There was an oversight in compatibility between drivers and riders. During a pair interview, one interviewee noted that successful recurring carpool arrangements require good relationships between all members of the carpool. This insight was important in shaping our final design to incorporate carpool matching not only based on location and time but also on similar interests and riding habits.
Unexpected events and commitments require flexibility in commuting schedules
One interviewee noted unpredictable schedule changes due to having to not only commute to school but also their job off-campus. Our final design takes this insight into account by integrating an unexpected events feature in the case that drivers cannot provide carpooling for any last-minute reasons. This differed from our initial idea that riders would completely cancel rides when experiencing an unexpected event. This insight allowed drivers the flexibility to delay a ride instead of canceling it altogether.
Early sketches of reporting problem for late driver to notify riders.
Iterative Design and Key Insights
Using the insights from our design research, we were able to pinpoint the specific features the app should include. To express these features and their interactions, we chose to focus on the following two primary tasks:
- Rider Delay Handling for Drivers
- Driver Delay Handling for Riders
We specifically chose these tasks in order to demonstrate the app’s functionality for common edge cases or exceptions (i.e. a driver or rider being late), which would disrupt the ideal flow of carpooling. For each task walkthrough, we created low-fidelity sketches, later transforming it into a paper prototype. Once we developed the paper prototype for each walkthrough, we underwent several rounds of both heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Evaluators were asked to use Nielsen’s Heuristics for UI design and usability tester to use the paper prototype as they would in the task situations.
From these evaluations, we derived the following three key insights:
Driver Grace Period Flexibility
In the original design, drivers only had access to the Auto-Suspend feature for determining their rider late tolerance. It was only after the preset grace period passed that the driver would be given options to choose the next action. However, in the usability tests, a key insight we discovered was that a driver’s late tolerance could change daily or even every ride. To give the driver more freedom, in addition to the Auto-Suspend feature, we provided a “time-of-error” option, which allows the driver to manually select their late tolerance the instant they have arrived at the pickup location. This allows drivers to have more freedom, rather than feeling obligated to wait due to settings that were saved way in advance.
Updated interface to provide grace period flexibility.
Unclear Understanding of “Auto-Suspend” Feature
In our initial app prototype, we wanted to give the drivers flexibility and boundaries to set for their driver profile. We implemented an “Auto-Suspend” feature, which allows drivers to choose how long they’d be willing to wait for a rider upon arrival. However, many of our evaluators shared that this terminology was both unclear and app-specific. In our design iteration, we maintained the “Auto-Suspend” feature, however, we included an information pop-up that explains its functionality to clear up any confusion.
Adjusting late tolerance level and auto-suspend feature in driver profile
Enhance Interface Consistency
Consistency was another key insight derived from the evaluations. In the original prototype, there were different icons and terminology used that were ultimately the same feature. This not only caused visual discrepancies but also created usage confusion. Similarly, some features allowed users to modify settings or times, however, they lacked any confirmation or save button. For drivers, this interface would be more difficult to navigate, as it is easy to misselect. To iterate upon this, we ensured terminology was consistent across all interfaces, added escape features, and created clear identifiers for what happens if a user modifies something.
Improved consistency for pickup screen