These days, a lot of the business of both taxi companies and PH services comes from corporate accounts. In order to support their work with these accounts, our Dispatch system should support inserting the details of different accounts and associate rides that are booked through the account. In addition, dispatchers should have the ability to filter the list of rides done under a certain account and export this list. This is to allow our customers to continue working with external billing and invoicing services that are used to charge the accounts for the rides taken.
To date, the dispatch is in BETA testing, working with a design partner in South America
My Role
I received full ownership for UX of the dispatch system, and I became the lead designer for all new features.
As a dispatcher, I want to associate a ride with a corporate account while booking it, in order to have documentation of all the rides that were taken from a specific account
Goals for feature design
We interviewed our stakeholders to determine the goals for designing this feature. We made sure to view the problem holistically and addressed three different types of goals: usability, business and branding.
The feature idea came from a specific need from our design partner. here were the basic requirements and needs:
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Dispatcher can create a new account
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Dispatcher can view the details of an account
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Dispatcher can edit the details of an account
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Dispatcher can delete an account
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Dispatcher can view a list of all accounts
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Dispatcher can search for a specific account
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Dispatcher can book a ride and associate it to an existing account in the booking process
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While editing a ride, dispatcher can associate it to an account
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While editing a ride, dispatcher can change/delete its connection to an account
The idea
Integrating the ability to add corporate accounts to the dispatch
Challenges
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Needs to be simple and quick
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Shouldn’t clash with other features in the app
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Needs to pop out as a new feature, not being the main feature of the app
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Needs to give the feeling of “trust”
Target Audience
WeGo users, Male & Female, age 20-50. very popular in Europe
Research and inspiration
I began looking at the existing taxi ordering apps and navigation apps similar to WeGo and captured what I saw to be good ideas. I found that most of the main features in these apps are similar to WeGo's functionality. I also found that each app has a different starting flow. for example, some app begins the experience asking the user to define the "pickup location" and define a "destination". other apps skip the "destination" screen and only ask for "pickup location".
Findings
None of the navigation apps has the option of ordering directly from the app. All of the competitor's apps force the user to leave the app and open or download an external app to proceed with the taxi booking. My challenge is to find the right combination of flows and integrate it into WeGo.
Wireframes
There are three entry points to start the prosses of booking from the main screen of WeGo. My challenge here was to find a smart way to promote the booking of a taxi feature on the main screen of the app without overwriting the current and main use of the app, which is navigating and fining bus routs.
I decided to add a FAB (Floating Action Button) to the home screen which will lead the user to the booking flow. Selecting this route will lead the user to the taxi tab.
The user can also use the apps search bar which will result in suggestions of all results for the user to select what kind of transportation he/she will like to use. i.e. buses, bike, driving, walking and now cabs...
Here is my first draft for the wireframe...this flow will eventually change in the future due to new learnings along the way and changes in the products requirements :)
Initial UI design
The next step after creating the wireframes, I got a better understanding of the flow. I've presented the wires to my team and received excellent feedback and made the adjustments in the UI accordingly.
Initial UI design
The next step after the sketches faze, I got a better understanding of how the toolbar should behave and started testing a number of layouts for the bar.
Houston, we got a problem...
A short while after we released the taxi booking feature to 3 large cities in Europe (London, Berlin, Rome) we received feedback from users regarding a problem with the pickup location.
The problem was that users would set the pickup to "My location", the address that the system will receive was based on the lat long the GBS recognized. but in many cases, the address was not the correct one for the pickup. for example, if a user entered a building from address A, then relocated his position to a side of the building that was closer to another address, the GPS will show address B instead of address A, which is the actual address the user would like to be pickuped from.
UX solution
The ideal solution for this issue was to solve this from the backend by adjusting the data to be as accurate as possible.
Meanwhile, after doing some research, I came up with a solution the required adding a function where the user can adjust his pickup point manually. the downside to this solution is that it adds another step to the booking process. At this point, we had realized that this is adding a step may cost a bit more time to the user, but we did gain accuracy to the pickup location and resulted in avoiding frustration and reduced the number of order cancellations.
Adjusting the flow
Adding the step of the manual selection for the pickup location required me to create two flows in the app. one flow, for a user who starts their experience by using standard search i.e. from/to. and the second flow for a user who started the experience from tapping on the "Book a taxi" CTA.
Next steps...
The development team and I will work closely and make new changes. After we release the new pickup feature we will ask to get information from the data team and compare the number of cancellations and the number completed rides from before the changes and after. and learn to see if the changes we made reduced the number of cancellation and reached the goal of satisfaction towards the user. good luck to us ;)
Meanwhile...I started working on some marketing for the new feature...see ya in the app store ;)
