During our rich conversations with gig-economy workers in the San Francisco Bay Area (mainly drivers of ridesharing services), we were shocked to find that many of them lacked access to basic human amenities while working their sometimes multiple day shifts. Our team wanted to build and test a mobile app, Coral, that could leverage the economy of this rapidly growing population and provide benefits to all of its contributors; like fish in a coral reef.
As a former driver partner with Lyft and Doordash, I began this project with an empathetic perspective and helped steer the overall direction of the project. I was able to access resources for those in the know, and led the user research portion of the project. As a team we all contributed to all aspects, but I focused more directly on the visual design and public presentation components.
In our needfinding we discovered that driver partners feel low priority to Uber/Lyft corporations and looked down upon by their passengers. Some drivers feel unfulfilled by their job and see it as only temporary. Drivers often feel unsafe, especially at night. Drivers have difficulty finding basic amenities/facilities while on the road. There's very little social interaction and sense of community with their co-workers (other drivers).
Initial designs
By testing our low fidelity paper prototypes with users, we were able to expose and address specific shortcomings of our current prototype. Some changes included simplifying the map, changing toggles to buttons, and changing size and style of icons to be more visible. We took these learnings into our next stage of prototyping.
Medium fidelity prototype
Using Figma both to design screens and link them together, we created a medium fidelity wireframe of our initial user interface. By translating our prototype into a digital screen, we were able to create a more true to feeling experience that our users could interact with more naturally, as many had never engaged in usability testing before and had trouble understanding how to use our paper prototypes. We fleshed out three critical tasks and how the user would complete them. Some major design changes include map and icon styling, the number and styling of the pins, and improving the use of color to be more descriptive.
High fidelity prototype
We presented our work at the CS147 Industry Project Fair among 35 other teams from the class. Judged by 16 industry professionals, our project won Best Overall Project and Best Demo.
Reflections
At the end of the day, I'm really happy i got to work on this project with some great teammates. There's still a long ways to go before coral will be ready to be released in any app store, but hopefully the idea being mindful of the needs of driver partners instead of only customers will be adopted by these gig-economy platforms soon.
