Design a shared carpool experience for Lyft.

Clarification Questions?

• Is the idea to revamp the existing functionality? Assume Yes.

• Any resource or time constraints?

• Any other company goals in mind or I can make assumptions as I go along also. 

Company Mission/Carpool Purpose:

• Lyft's mission is to improve people's lives with the world's best transportation. By doing it economically, socially, and environmentally. 

• A shared carpool experience ties directly into that mission of making transportation economical and ultimately decrease.

Goal;

• Where Lyft is as a product right now and the fact that Shared Carpool will probably have benefits of lower price point - their goal is to maintain market share from new users and keep existing users when compared to their competitors locally and internationally - Uber, Ola, etc.

 Users/User Needs:

• Driver

  • Someone who uses Lyft already

  • Someone who has never used Lyft

• Passenger

  • Someone who uses Lyft already

  • Someone who has never used Lyft

• We will focus on Passengers and Drivers that have used Lyft before as they are aware of how the product works and are willing to take the chance on a new feature, allowing Lyft to maintain Market Share as compared to competitors. 

 User Journey/Needs

• Driver: 

• • Login In

  • Get notified

  • Pick up/Drop off

  • Set time to end Work Day

• Passenger: 

  • • Decide to go somewhere

    • Open app and type in location

    • Look at prices and estimated time

    • Books ride type (shared, single, XL, etc) 

    • If shared is selected - people get added on and time increases

    • Arrive to destination

    • Review driver

Lets focus the first set of improvements on the passenger experience as that will tie back to the goal/metric is to maintain market share for passengers and then should trickle into drivers also. 

Passenger Pain-Points: 

• Price difference is not enough so go with shared option

• Takes longer since its not direct 

• More people get added on after (estimated time increases) 

• When booking you don’t know what order your drop-off will be until the ride is confirmed

• Would not want to share a ride (especially in COVID) with anyone random

• Wants to get dropped off at location and not around there

• Limited incentive to Review a rider

Pain-Points Prioritized

• I will first shorten this list down by omitting: 

  • Price Difference Not High: This is specific to pricing strategy and for the sake of this question, we will not look at this. I would assume the pricing strategy is still a part that needs to be considered. 

  • Doesn’t want to walk: This does not seem like an issue that would drive someone to use Carpool Share more than not. 

  • Review Incentive: This addresses a different success metric and goal that is outside of driving engagement and maintaining market share amongst passengers. 

• Then I will prioritize the rest: 

Based on the prioritization and tying back to the goals - I would focus on two pain points. 

• Pooling with Random Person

• People Added After

Solutions

• Custom Carpool: Ability to decide who you want to carpool with. maybe you know of a friend that is going to the same area so being able to input that. Decreases different random passengers but also price could go up.  

• Information Sharing: After selecting location and shared, you are able to see who you are pooling with, a picture of them (maybe with a mask on), and profile information (showing the reviews that person has gotten from the driver)

• Passenger with Passenger Review: Currently there is no way to review a co-passenger but giving an ability to do that will allow users to understand if they feel comfortable with taking the ride. 

Prioritize

Based on that - I would prioritize the feature where pictures can be taken of your co-carpooler wearing a mask and that is shared along with reviews of the passenger (from the driver perspective). I would do the passenger to passenger review and not a direct impact on engagement. The custom carpool is a great feature but will take more time and I would consider this the next feature to build. 

Success Metrics:

• Key Metric

  • The key success metric would be looking at how many % of users booking rideshares are booking shared rides

• Secondary: 

  • Seeing Total Users booking Lyft

  • Seeing if down time has decreased for users.