With all the buzz about an autonomous future, Uber and Tesla have been placed on the poster for innovation in automobile and ground transportation by the entire tech community. Uber has been getting all the attention with its driverless experiment in Pittsburgh but its home rival Lyft wants the world to know that you shouldn’t just ignore its potential.

In a Medium post published recently by Lyft co-founder John Zimmer shared his predictions for the future of ground transportation. With this post, he highlights the obvious problem with private car ownership. The cars just aren’t used enough to justify building our cities around them. With ridesharing gaining momentum and vehicle ownership on the decline, the future cities will be built around people and not cars.

He highlights three key shifts; a widespread autonomous fleet accounting for majority of Lyft rides within five years, car ownership will fade significantly by 2025 and cities’ physical environment will change as a result.

These of course are his predictions and observations, not really an outline of the plans Lyft has drafted. However, pretty much what he has shared makes sense. The change has already started and the interest of major automobile companies in sharing economy is a clear sign that they are anticipating and accepting the change. Ford recently invested in Zoomcar, Volvo launched cars that can use phones as keys for easy sharing, PSA group invested in another car sharing startups and these are just some of the examples.

“Ridesharing has already begun to empower many people to live without owning a car. The age of young people with driver’s licenses has been steadily decreasing ever since right around when I was born. In 1983, 92% of 20 to 24-year-olds had driver’s licenses. In 2014 it was just 77%. In 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds had licenses. Today it’s just 24%. All told, a millennial today is 30% less likely to buy a car than someone from the previous generation.”

Zimmer also highlights how ridesharing is the first phase of the movement to end car ownership and with autonomy entering the picture, transportation will turn into a subscription service which will be more flexible than owning. Heavy users will pick subscriptions like Netflix while occasional users will opt for pay as you go sort of plans.

As consumers won’t keep holding onto their private vehicles when there is a shift to transportation as a service model, this would allow for an easier shift towards cleaner vehicles. There are lot of details to be worked out before this becomes a reality but the change is certainly heading towards us.

That said, Zimmer hasn’t really shared much on how Lyft plans to achieve that apart from the fact that they are working towards the same with General Motors and also used the opportunity to tag public demonstrations of self-driving technology by his competitors as marketing stunts. Zimmer has painted a pretty picture of the future of transportation but there are more questions to be answered about the future of Lyft too.

You can find the Medium post here.

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Using a product involves making decisions. And when we give users a choice, we often have a vested interest in them choosing one option over another. Because we know it’ll make their experience less complex. Because we know they’ll save time that way. Or even because it’ll improve the experience for other users.

When we confront users with these decisions, asking them a simple yes/no question will help them choose the best option.

Let me tell you how I found this out…

At BlaBlaCar, our product is a peer-to-peer ridesharing platform. We connect people who need a ride somewhere with car owners going the same way. Car owners offer a ride, co-travellers book a seat with them. Pretty simple concept.

But when car owners offer a ride, there’s a divergence in the way they might want their experience to go. Do they want co-travellers’ bookings to be approved automatically? Or do they want to choose which co-travellers they travel with, by approving or declining each booking themselves?

A seamless experience

We want our members’ travel experience to be seamless. They need to have as few interactions with our product as possible, and little to no waiting time.

So for both car owners and co-travellers, the most seamless experience is clearly to have bookings approved automatically. But in some of our markets just 1 in 4 car owners were choosing this option.

You might think, why not just remove the option to approve or decline bookings, and force “automatic approval” on everyone? But remember, our product connects people who’ve never met so they can share rides together. It’s a new concept for many people, and one we need to make them feel comfortable about. Allowing new car owners the option to choose exactly who they take in their car is a way to break down that first barrier, so there was never any question of removing it entirely.

However, we know that once a car owner has shared their car a few times and has become comfortable with the idea, automatically approving bookings will greatly smoothen their experience. So we wanted to increase the number of car owners choosing this option.

But before we could find a solution, we had to identify the cause of the problem. Why were more of our experienced car owners not choosing to automatically approve bookings?

This is the original screen-Manage booking requests? Automatic Approval? Manual Approval? What does this all mean!!

One of our hypotheses was that car owners just didn’t understand the benefits of approving automatically — this was based on two assumptions. Firstly, that they were scanning rapidly over the screen (as the majority of us do with any online product) and the content wasn’t obvious enough for them to see the advantages of choosing that option. Secondly, that they didn’t understand the question, or the answers. “Automatic Approval” and “Manual Approval” are terms we invented, terms specific to the BlaBlaCar product, and not at all intuitive.

So, we changed the question, and we changed the answers. The hypothesis was that car owners weren’t fully understanding the options in front of them, so we went for simple. Really, really simple.

This is the new screen. Now we ask car owners a simple yes/no question. And they get it.

Yes or no?

How many times a day do you ask yes/no questions? Do you want a cup of tea? Yes or no? Do I really need to come to your 3-hour strategy meeting? Yes or no? Will you proofread my Medium article? Yes or no?

We do it a lot, and we do it because it’s very precise. A yes/no question leaves very little room for misinterpretation or for a vague answer. So that’s why we decided to ask our car owners, “Automatically approve bookings? Yes or no?”

Of course this design was purely based on a hypothesis, so we AB tested it. And the results quickly gave us the proof we needed — as many as 37% more car owners were choosing to automatically approve bookings.

A better-informed decision for a better experience

This improvement happened because we asked a simple question. The simplest question. The content changes were of course accompanied by visual design changes, but the goal was the same, to simplify the screen and get the user focused on the question being asked.

Simple content always helps users use your product in the right way. And when there are two ways of using your product, simplicity can also help them make a better-informed decision, for a better experience.

Author

Paul Stairmand is Content Specialist at BlaBlaCar, the peer-to-peer ridesharing platform. He’s a designer… of words. He crafts the words for the BlaBlaCar website and mobile apps, creating the content that makes the UX design work. He believes that good content makes users understand things without knowing there was anything to understand.

This post first appeared on Medium and has been republished with author’s permission.

The post The power of simple questions- Another interesting case from BlaBlaCar appeared first on TravHQ.

At BlaBlaCar simplicity is in our blood. We spend our days designing and building a product that’s easy, that’s simple to use.

Content plays a huge part in this. In my role as Product Content Specialist, I hold a large part of the responsibility for making our website and app as simple as possible. When you use BlaBlaCar to find people to share a city-to-city car journey, we need you to understand our words and understand them straight away, with no effort.

There are many ways we do this — keeping each sentence short, sticking to one message, limiting the number of possible actions, using consistent terminology. But the thing that has really made the difference for us, is keeping it obvious.

Being obvious is about being precise, being unambiguous. But most importantly, it’s about not allowing the user to make any assumptions. If you leave them in any doubt, you can easily find them using your product in completely the wrong way.

And I know this all too well. Let me tell you the story of one of our most recent features, and what happened when we didn’t make our content obvious enough.

The feature in question is Govt. ID verification. We recently developed this feature so that BlaBlaCar members could upload an identity document, which is then verified. Their BlaBlaCar profile then shows that they’ve verified their Govt. ID, and increases their trustworthiness in the eyes of other members — an essential attribute for a user of our peer-to-peer ridesharing platform.

On our mobile app, we built a flow to allow members to upload their Govt. ID in three steps. First, we told them what types of Govt. ID they could use. Second, we showed them their name as it appears on their BlaBlaCar profile, and asked them to make sure it matched the name on their ID. Finally, we asked them to take a photo of their ID and submit it for verification. This is what it looked like:

Step 1 — Get your ID

Step 2 — Verify your name

Step 3 — Take a photo

Our users did something we never expected.

So it seems pretty simple, right? But remember, you’ve got the context. I’ve just explained to you the whole purpose of the feature and how it’s supposed to work. The first members who used this feature didn’t have that much detail. And they did something we never expected.

Take a look at the flow again — any idea where and how they went wrong?

Well, they took selfies. Photos of themselves, instead of photos of their Govt. ID, which they then submitted to us. And when you look back at the third step, you can see why. The call-to-action button was asking them to take a photo.

So they did.

By focusing too hard on giving a direct explanation of the next action the user would have to take, we left room for them to make assumptions. And the most common assumption was, “I have to take a photo now, that must mean a photo of me”. And when you consider that most users scan screens at the speed of light, especially in one-screen-one-action flows such as this, it’s hardly surprising they made this assumption.

So how did we fix the problem? Well, we simply changed the wording on the call to action of step 3 to “Upload my ID”.

Making the content more obvious made for a simpler product and a more successful user experience.

Whereas the previous “Take a photo” had led to incorrect assumptions, its replacement “Upload my ID” leaves no doubt. It may not tell the user exactly what’s going to happen next, that they’re going to be taken to a camera functionality, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll realise that when they get there. At least now, they’re in no doubt about what we need them to take a photo of.

And it worked! The number of correctly uploaded IDs increased by 140%. Making the content more obvious made for a simpler product and ultimately a more successful user experience for our members.

You’ve really got to make it obvious. Often far more obvious than you think. If you leave any room for doubt, users make assumptions, and interpret what you’re telling them based on their habits, their intuition, their initial split-second reaction. But if your content is obvious, if it can only be interpreted in one way, your users will get the best possible experience out of your product.

Author

Paul Stairmand is Content Specialist at BlaBlaCar, the peer-to-peer ridesharing platform. He’s a designer… of words. He crafts the words for the BlaBlaCar website and mobile apps, creating the content that makes the UX design work. He believes that good content makes users understand things without knowing there was anything to understand.

This post first appeared on Medium and has been republished with author’s permission.

The post Obvious content, Simple product- An interesting case from BlaBlaCar appeared first on TravHQ.

Uber has partnered with Toyota for a strategic investment and an auto leasing deal. The ridesharing company waged a whole new level of war in the world.

The company is proud to announce the partnership as the popularity of Toyota cars as Uber vehicles have far reaching effects which explain Uber’s financing program for Toyota cars.

The terms of the deal are kept veiled as there aren’t many but according to the car manufacturer’s release, the companies have entered a MoU and are interested in exploring the opportunities that lie in the ridesharing segment, starting with trials in countries that have lately adopted ridesharing as a concept and are expanding. This MoU takes various factors into account such a business regulations, conditions, and customer needs.

The leasing deal by Toyota will not only boost Uber’s drivers and Xchange financing program but will also boost the self- vehicle driving future for the company. Though there were no particular mentions of self-driving cars, but as Toyota, a leader in self-driving technology, is the name involved, many tech and car manufacturers have started investing in ridesharing services.

Toyota Research Institute, which was announced last November, was credited with $1 billion by the car manufacturer for the development of AI and robotics for the self-driving capabilities. Uber’s rival Lyft had gotten half a billion from GM earlier this year as a step forward to work with ridesharing companies.

There has been a slew of self-driving tech deals taking up major space in the industry by some prominent players. Volkswagen confirmed a $300 million deal with the New York-based ridesharing startup Gett yesterday morning and Apple added a $1 billion investment to the recently named Chinese rideshare service Didi Chuxing earlier this May.

Source: TechCrunch

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