How would you redo Uber Pool to make it a success?

Product Understanding-

Uber Pool is a car pool service provided by Uber. The riders going in the same direction can share a cab together. It is economical than getting a personal cab and good for the environment as well.

The user journey is that

1. The user opens the app to book a cab enters the pick up and drop location, clicks on Uber pool option, selects the payment method and clicks on search.
2. The algorithm will then prompts drivers to accept the ride request who are driving on a route that fits the route of the rider the best.
3. After accepting the request, the driver can start moving towards the pickup location. The rider will get the cab location and other locations on the app.
4. Once the driver reaches the location, the rider will share the OTP with the driver to start the ride.

Assumptions-

Will be focusing on the mobile app of Uber.

Focus will be on improving the user engagement.

I’ll be solving the question based on the Indian Context.

Geographical location- Nothing in particular

User Persona-

Since the goal here is to improve engagement, we’ll focus on the riders.

The riders can be divided into three personas-

Power Users- People who use the service almost daily, like office goers

Occasional Users- People who use the service 3-4 times a month, like college students, some of the office goers who use public transport for commute to save time and hassle of driving fall into this segment too

Casual Users- People who use the service on rare occasions eg. on occasions when they don’t want to drive

We will be focusing on occasional users as they have the potential to book more rides which will help in driving engagement.

Pain Points-

1. Car Pooling means having multiple stops before reaching the destination- This consumes a lot of time. Riders, if in a hurry, would want to reach their destination in reasonable time
2. Safety is often a concern because who they share their ride with is not in their hands

List of Solutions-

1. The distance between consecutive pickups and drops can be made between 1-3km.
2. Number of riders at a time could be limited to 3 so that the number of stops are less and there is enough space in the backseat that they can sit comfortably
3. A panic or SOS button can be added to the app which when pressed will notify the rider’s emergency contacts and will share their live location and driver details with them.
4. A camera could be installed in the app with proper governance mechanism in place to prevent tampering
5. Rider requests can be optimised using AI to ensure that it matches the routes as much as possible

Building feature 1 would not require a lot of efforts, but would have a high impact on customer experience which will drive engagement. Along with that, feature 3 will require medium effort, but will yield high impact.

Feature 2 might improve customer experience but will impact revenue. Feature 4 will take time and effort to execute, moreover it will require a lot of bandwidth to store all the footage and to bring in governance. Feature 5 will have a high impact but will take a long time to execute.

Summary-

There are three kinds of users of uber pool service, casual, occasional and power. The focus will be on increasing the frequency of rides taken by the occasional users. The pain points of this cohort is that they are worried that it will take a lot of time and that it is not safe to travel with the strangers. To tackle this problem, we will optimise the stops such that consecutive pickup or drop locations are not more than 3km apart. Moreover, the app will have safety feature like a panic button that will alert the rider’s emergency contacts and will share their live location along with driver details.