TAG is a carpooling app in Turkey designed for people who would like to share their rides and costs with someone else. We all have daily trips to the school, work or home. Daily trips are a part of everyday life and inevitable. So why it should not be more comfortable, affordable and convenient with a car.
The Challenge
TAG offers free trips to newcomer users in order to get them used to the app more easily. During the past few months, we have observed an increase in the number of fraud trips due to this free trip usage. We have to manage and prevent fraud trips when then the number of users increase. We need to prevent the free trips usage as fraud and make passengers add more credit card information.They can not match anyone as a passenger who does not have any free trips and does not have a credit card. The main challenges:
- To get users routinely at least once a week.
- To continously make customer management when the volume is increased at a time when we launch the app.
- To expand the carpooling to a large population In Istanbul.
- Attracting users of all pilot location community.
User Personas
Based on these 5 interviews I created 2 user personas of current mobile application user.
User Stories
We have reviewed fraud actions individually to find out why users make fraud and why they do not add credit cards. In order to create realistic user stories, We surveyed organic users, aged between 22 to 35, who go to school, work or home at least more then once every week. The questions focused on the fraud and payments. Main takeaways:
- 6 of them said they wanted to get more free rides, so they can try the app with anyone.
- 4 of them said They do not accept that they are making fraud so The TAG app have to prove the fraud rides.
- 5 of them said They wanted to earn more money from rides so They keep using the TAG App.
- 3 of them said They want to see where they will be picked up and where they will drop off.
- 2 of them said they wanted to track the car on the route at a current ride time, so they can see where the driver/passenger is and driver/passenger is coming or not.
- 2 of them said They wanted to add debit cards instead of credit cards.
- All of them wanted to see more results as driver and passenger around their living / working area.
Defining the Key Pain Points
- Some people notice that they forget to cancel ride before ride time.
- Some users are not aware that they can poke driver/passenger to share live location.
- When people want to find a driver/passenger any desired route at any desired time, it is not plausible for them to match that immediately.
- Most of users are in hurry to go to school, work or home so they don’t have enough time to spend several minutes.
- Uncertain ride time, some people said that they don’t have exact time to start ride every day. Due to different reasons everyone starts to ride on different times of the day.
Solving the Problem
My idea is to prevent frauds on an app that users can refer to. The free trip rights let users make Fraud rides so We need to separate who really wants to make fraud and who does not. Solution for the fraud problem: We propose to introduce less free trips and track passengers/drivers locations. So We will compare and match locations between driver / passenger and route details.
We created a solution and a flow, where passengers/drivers can share locations among each other. If one of the users does not allow The TAG to access location, then others can poke him/her with a message. After completing location issues you can track your driver/passenger switch between the users you’re riding with and you can send a quick/ready messages by clicking on the message icon at the bottom of the map screen to the people you’re riding with. If for some reason this feature is disabled by the user or the location information is not accurate, there is a way to reopen and share location information.
As a solution, I did the following:
- Changed the amount of new comer free trips and Created a new way to earn free rides by adding credit card details for passengers.
- Redesigned the Live tracking screens to provide a better tracking experience for users.
- Created a clear pathway to “get one more free ride” feature that is currently show up after completed first 2 trips.
- Followed the free trips where users share money earned by fraud
- Upper budget limit per free trip
- Checking the reciprocal location of users and location changes during the trip
Illustrating the User Flow
Before creating a prototype, I set out to illustrate a user flow in a chart. This helps me to understand how a user interacts with the app to perform tasks he wants to complete.
Sketching Low-Fidelity Wireframes & Conducting User Testings
After creating the user flow, the next step was to sketch low-fidelity wireframes of the app.
Due to time constraints, I manage to conduct only 1 user-testing with the sketches. Nevertheless, the feedback I received was used to help establish a high-fidelity prototype for the next stage of the project.
Execution: Design
The app which is used by the user every day should have the features that have been seen by them every day. Therefore, the same steps designed the app where the icons and options are looked alike in the similar pattern.
Execution: Prototyping
My Thoughts on the Project
The user experience research, prototypes, and the presentation slides were created in a one week. This is rapid prototyping, typical of agile work practices. Given more time to our small product team, I believe the project can be more detailed and more user testings may be conducted before working on a high fidelity prototype. I am happy with the outcome and believe that the users would like to use the app that I have created.
Takeaways
This feature/challenge was super motivating for me to increase my awareness for design problems we face from day to day. As designers it can be so easy to assume we know what is best for the product, but we need to remember that we are not designing for ourselves, but for our users. I believe we shouldn’t be satisfied with the existing solutions without fraud results and try constantly improve the solutions even if we fail many times during this process.
Thank you for reading! If you found this article useful and If you have another idea how to make it better, feel free to share it with me!
Follow me on Dribbble or Behance to get notified when I publish something new. 🎉
I’d love to hear your feedback. How was your impression? What did you like/dislike?
