Taxi on demand
Overview
In our quest to create unforgettable travel experiences, Booking.com embarked on a journey to integrate a taxi on-demand service into our mobile app. Our mission was clear: Make travel seamless and enjoyable for our users. To achieve this, we embraced a user-centered design approach and organized a Design Sprint to ensure that our taxi service met the unique needs and preferences of our diverse user base.
Role
Product Designer: Led the design efforts, including user research, wireframing, prototyping, and ensuring the visual design aligned with Booking.com’s brand.
All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Booking.com
The Problem
Booking.com, renowned for its accommodation offerings, identified a common pain point among travelers: navigating local transportation in foreign destinations. Language barriers, currency differences, and unfamiliarity with local taxi providers often left travelers feeling overwhelmed and uncertain. Our challenge was to solve this problem by seamlessly integrating an on-demand taxi service into our app.
Users and Audience
Our users were as diverse as the places they traveled to. We catered to leisure travelers seeking adventure, families in search of quality vacations, and business professionals navigating unfamiliar cities. Understanding these unique user profiles was pivotal to designing an inclusive solution.
Our Team and Responsibilities
In our dynamic team, I was the sole product designer, driving the user experience and interface.
| Product Designer | Product Manager | Development Team |
|---|---|---|
| My role was to | Our Product Manager played a pivotal role in defining the project scope, priorities, and aligning our efforts with Booking.com’s overall strategy. | Our development team was responsible for building the technical infrastructure, ensuring secure payments, and optimizing app performance. |
Scope and Constraints
Our project’s scope was defined by the need to create a feature-rich on-demand taxi service within the existing Booking.com mobile app. This meant ensuring that the service could seamlessly handle bookings, payments, and communication with local taxi providers worldwide.
Constraints included aligning with local regulations, addressing potential language barriers, and accommodating various payment methods and currencies. Integration needed to be smooth and not disrupt the existing user experience of the app.
User-Centered approach and Design Sprint
We kicked off with a user-centered approach, which started with extensive research. We conducted interviews with travelers who had faced transportation challenges in Asia to understand their pain points. This research guided us in creating user personas, such as couples, families with no children, and solo travelers.
Competitive analysis: Exploring the on-demand taxi service landscape
Since Uber made its grand entrance, on-demand taxi services have taken the world by storm. The convenience of hailing a ride with a few taps on your smartphone has sparked a surge in similar services, turning the marketplace into a bustling hub of innovation and popularity. As I embarked on my research journey, I decided to dive deep into this dynamic landscape by exploring a handful of competitors, dissecting their user experience, user flow, user interface, and standout features.
User Interviews: Gaining insights from seasoned travelers
To truly grasp the problem we were tackling, we continued our journey by talking to a group of five seasoned travellers who had explored Asia and made use of taxi services there. I crafted a set of 20 questions neatly divided into four categories:
- Pre-trip: We wanted to know how they decided on their destination and what drove their travel choices.
- Planning: It was essential to understand how they prepared for their trips, from booking accommodation to organizing their itinerary.
- Getting around the place: We delved into their experiences with various modes of transportation, why they chose specific ones, and whether they found them satisfactory.
- Our product: To gauge their preferences, we explored what factors influenced their choice of a taxi service and whether they’d be interested in an on-demand taxi service seamlessly integrated into booking.com, one that automatically partners with local suppliers.
Rather than running these interviews like a dry Q&A session, we aimed to have engaging conversations and gather rich, qualitative feedback from our participants. We wanted to truly get inside their travel-savvy minds.
Crucial discoveries and emerged user categories
This step was pivotal in our journey. By delving deep into the challenges travelers face when using taxi services in Asia, we uncovered invaluable insights. These insights allowed us to identify common patterns and categorize the types of users we were designing the app for.
Our user categories boiled down to three key groups:
Defining user-flows
Our journey began by sketching out a high-level user flow map. This bird’s-eye view enabled us to see the bigger picture and understand the problem space in its entirety. We kept our user flow lean, ensuring it stayed under 15 steps.
One important assumption we made, backed by our research, was that customers had already booked their flights and accommodation in advance. This allowed us to focus on the taxi on-demand experience without getting tangled in unnecessary details.
Design Sprint: Unleashing creativity and efficiency
Incorporating a Design Sprint into our process was a game-changer. It turbocharged our progress, fostered collaboration, and ensured that every decision was rooted in real-world user insights. It was a whirlwind of creativity and efficiency that accelerated our journey towards creating a seamless and user-friendly Taxi On-Demand service for Booking.com users.
Ideation workshopWireframing & Prototyping
The team generated and shared a broad range of ideas as individuals. The goal was to push beyond our first idea and to generate a wide variety of solutions to our challenge. Using the generated outcomes, the wireframes were rapidly designed in one day and made into a simple click test-ready prototype.
Scenario
It was important to make the research a collaborative task with the Product Owner and our partner in Asia to align interests. A simple test script was decided and created and we set the following scenario:
- The user doesn’t know the pickup point (default)
- The user knows the pickup point
- Pickup point has changed
User testing
Usability was conducted in order to gather insight into the “on-demand” happy path end-to-end flow. The test Helped us to determine:
- Do users understand how “Current Location” relates to pick-up-point?
- How intuitive is the UI flow end-to-end?
- Do users understand confirm pickup step, and is this required?
The evaluation was based on an analysis of videos from 15 unmoderated usability test sessions of the proposed end-to-end flow for the on-demand taxi app. Each usability test session lasted between 5 and 15 minutes. The tasks proposed for the user in the prototype were:
- Search for a given destination
- Book a taxi
- Rate the driver and the service
Learnings
The participant’s general comments were that the flow was simple and easy to follow. The testing helped us to validate our ideas and answer some research questions:
- Do users understand how “Current Location” relates to pick-up-point?
Users prefer clear and consistent labelling of “to” and “from”. Showing their “current location” and not the pickup spot. However, users didn’t notice the change between the two. The “confirm location” CTA seemed to work well to resolve this. - How intuitive is the UI flow end-to-end?
All users were able to Book a Taxi and complete the trip with ease. - Did users understand confirm pickup step, and would this step be required in our flow?
Some participants mentioned that having a “confirm pickup” CTA helped a lot, as this added an additional validation step that was missing from the flow.
UI & Interation Design
After digesting the learnings from the user testing, the design process started and we began to build the experience. Booking.com has pretty solid design guidelines and a well-defined design language, which allowed us to save some time in small components, so we just had to focus on the features to be implemented.
Conclusion & next steps
The team successfully concluded the first phase of the project and acknowledged valuable learnings and insights from users. This project is not only about designing a taxi app but it also proposes an unconventional concept for a modern taxi app that can be used in many other cities, and also be linked with your holiday and accommodation services.
The features we designed collaborated to reduce the stress of using a taxi service, especially when customers are using this kind of service abroad.
The service is available in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It offers live feeds, real-time route maps, customer services translated in 40 languages and in-app cashless payments in the traveller’s currency.
