A Driver Acquisition Product Built For Emerging Markets

Uber • 2020

In emerging markets (India, Egypt), the majority of drivers onboard in person at Greenlight Hubs. With these centers being overburdened in dense markets, there was a need for physical onboarding via other means. The Hero program enables anyone to refer a driver and earn as long as the driver completes the trip requirements. We now needed a tool for these cohorts to manage their teams and track their earnings.

Role

As the Lead designer, I participated in the research study, created a 3 year vision for the team and executed the Alpha build. In addition, I mentored the work of two other designers on the project.

Impact

Within three months of the Alpha build launching, Hero was scaled to 20 countries. In that time, the channel grew to account for nearly 10% of Uber’s supply acquisition. We had just around 90% retention.

Ethnographic Research

We started by defining who the core users of this new tool were and what the needs were as well as identifying any additional gaps in their workflow. Working with our researcher, I shadowed and interviewed the teams regarding their existing workflow. The insights that came out of this were;

  • Most Heroes are using homegrown tools to run their business

  • Lead management is done manually in a non-compliant way

  • Poor visibility into earnings

  • Heroes lack tools for tracking the status of leads’ accounts, documents, and completed trips

Journey Mapping

The first step was creating a journey map to uncover any patterns and start defining the key users for this launch. The map breaks down by what the particular cohort is doing, the tools used for that job, and what their existing problems are. This helped identify some core areas to work on for the product.

The mapping exercise was immediately followed by a design sprint. I ran the sprint for two reasons;

➊ Gain alignment as we already had key partners on the trip. This was an pivotal moment to formulate on a single idea.

➋ Uncover any opportunities we might have missed over the past few days of research.

We decided to focus our efforts on a few immediate efforts and tackle the core features for the Alpha build.

1ST ENG DELIVERY

  • Sign in

  • Lead management

  • Desktop experience

ALPHA

  • Sign up/installation

  • Offline lead generation

  • Driver onboarding

  • Driver compliance

  • Financial management

After synthesizing the ideas from the sprint, I built out an diagram as the first share out. This visual artifact gave a good idea of the scope of work for engineers. We were able to have a discourse on what are existing tech stacks and when are where to create new ones.

The navigation reduces complexity by grouping secondary actions into the overflow menu

Designs

After numerous rounds of user validation and design feedback (org + team level) we developed an intuitive and usable solution for the Alpha launch. The Northstar was also designed in conjunction for the team to improve the product over the next few months as the Alpha was missing vital feature sets.

Key Features

Track Earnings

An earnings tracker was provided to keep track of the Hero’s overall earnings as well as a breakdown by week or month. The weekly earnings was calculated based on pattern math.

Consent

For legal purposes, the driver must now consent to having a Hero create an account on their behalf.

Notifications

The app provides notifications based on market data that is targeted to help improve business.

Driver Tracking

To resolve compliance issues, the Hero is able to track the driver’s progression through his own account.

Activity Feed

I designed an activity feed which would help alleviate the lack of trust Hero’s have towards Uber.

Driver Document Management

The documentation system makes it easy to parse and manage driver documents.

Core Screens

Adding A Driver

Driver Details

Team Member Details

Drivers Page (categories)

Reward Details

Notifications

We designed a logic for notifications to not bombard the user with messages. We have three touch points for these notifications; a marketing space, messages and the activity feed. The type and tier of notifications determined the space.

10 %

The launch was a smashing success. Within a few months of launching the Alpha, the program accounted for ten percent of Uber’s supply acquisition.

90 %

We had over ninety percent retention of the app as it simply was doing what [their] manual processes could not do.