Uber City Tour
A feature for tourists to explore cities in a smart way
OVERVIEW
What is Uber City Tour?
On vacations, tourists often struggle
creating a route that takes them to all the attractions efficiently.
The city tour feature within Uber
addresses these pain points by providing efficient multi-destination
sightseeing routes for tourists.
Team Project
Team project at UC Berkeley, Collaborated
with a UX Designer and
a UX Researcher
Timeline
4 Weeks
My Contributions
- UX Design
- Visual Design
- UX Research
Tools Used
- Sketch
- InVision
PROBLEM
Based on our research we observed that when visiting new cities, tourists lack a tool which helps them efficiently plan a multi-destination sightseeing tour.
GOAL
Minimize time spent in planning and researching to explore popular city attractions for travelers
WHY UBER?
Leverage Uber's presence in 600 cities in 65 countries worldwide to make the feature available for maximum tourists
PROPOSED SOLUTION
A feature within Uber app that helps tourists select from the list of multi-destination
predefined trips or allows them to create their own trip to explore a
new city in an efficient way.
3
Simple Steps
1 Select Route
2 Customize Route
3 Enjoy your
vacation
DESIGN PROCESS
We chose interviews as a first step to get a
thorough understanding of our user's pain points.
Research questions:
5
User Interviews with users who travel once
in 3 months
User quotes from interviews:
User Interviews
USER RESEARCH
1. What tools do they use before and during the trip for planning their vacation?
2. What are their pain points before and during the trip?
3. What features do travelers prefer to see in their
riding app when exploring a new city?
Key Insights
1
They must book all the rides individually when using ride sharing app
2
They need to figure out optimized route
with the help of maps to visit all
the attractions
3
Users currently use multiple apps like notes, vacation blogs, maps to plan the trip
Recommendations
Use following criteria for quantitative analysis
1. Commute options used by most users
2. Find their common struggles
3. Most important
factors
Online Surveys
Based on the important criteria identified from the
interviews, we conducted surveys to understand pain points of the majority of the users.
20
Users took
the survey
Key Insights
1
We found that
70% users
preferred Uber
to commute in a new city.
2
They preferred
spending minimum amount of money on travel,
while having comfort and flexibility as their top priorities
3
Most common struggles are:
1. Finding things
to do
2. Putting all attractions in such an order to avoid traffic and save time
Recommendations
Use following criteria for feature prioritization
1. Provide list of popular attractions
2. Focus on how to provide flexibility
3. Suggest the most optimized route
Competitive Analysis
We performed a competitive analysis to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the Uber app competitors.
This helped us understand what important features other competitors have and where we can fill the gap.
Ride
Sharing Apps
User Persona
We created a user persona to represent a user group
with similar behaviors, goals and frustrations. This gave us a clear idea about user expectations, and how they would interact with our feature.
Sonia & Tim
work. travel. repeat
Sonia and Tim live in New York. A workaholic
couple who also loves traveling whenever they
can squeeze in a break. Due to their hectic
lifestyle, planning a vacation is always a big task
for them. They are interested in trying different cuisines and cultures.
Adventurous, Foodies, Workaholic
Their Pain Points
1. Do not have a lot of time to research and plan a trip
2. Do not enjoy crowded modes of travel to commute
3. They like having flexibility when on vacation
The easiest and the fastest is the best! -Sonia & Tim
Their Goals
1. Find readymade trip packages.
2. Private Experience
3. Efficient way to visit more places in available time
FEATURE IDEAS EXPLORATIONS
We then conducted a brainstorming exercise to help us explore possibilities and opportunities for features considering the user research insights and challenges to work with existing Uber app.
Challenges
Adding a feature without disturbing
Uber's current business model
Showing estimated cost to the riders
for the chosen route
Working within Uber design
guidelines
Suggesting route options based on time duration selected by rider
Key Features
On the basis of user research insights and keeping persona in mind we decided to implement following features to address all key pain points.
Choose from recommended
routes to explore attractions
Customize any route at any point of time
View and add reviews to the routes
Option to create your
own route
Listen to an audio guide to know more about your upcoming destination
Share your favorite routes with your friends
USER FLOW
INITIAL SKETCHES
WIREFRAME EXPLORATIONS
USER TESTING
5
Users to test each version who travel once in 6 months
1. A/B Testing to evaluate feature discovery on the home screen
Task Scenario
1. You have arrived in a new city, and want to explore popular attraction with new city tour feature by Uber. Where will you start in the app?
10
Users who travel
once in 6 months
2. Usability Testing to evaluate
pre-planned routes vs. build your own route feature
Research Question
1. Which feature (popular routes/build your own) is preferred by most of the users and why?
Insights
1
8/10 users clicked on popular routes since it was readymade, quick, and easy.
Though they wanted freedom and flexibility, building route on their own was again a lot of effort and time consuming.
2
3
They were interested to see how they can customize the chosen popular route.
1
Remove "build your own route" feature
Recommendations
2
Make popular route feature customizable for the users
3. Usability Testing to evaluate
main screen to choose from a list of popular routes
4
Users who travel
once in 6 months
Step 2 - Customize route at any time
Users can change the time duration based on time available in hand to explore the city and the routes will be suggested to them based on their time preference. They can also delete some destinations which they don't want to visit, and add new ones of their choice to the route.
Step 3 - Book the ride and enjoy the vacation
Once the users are happy with their chosen route, they can tap confirm route and select Uber car type as usual. Once on to the route, they can listen to an audio guide to know more about the upcoming destination either on headphones or request the driver to play on the car speakers for all the passengers to enjoy!
KEY LEARNINGS
1 Learning from a cross functional team
I collaborated with a UX researcher on this project. Working with people from different backgrounds taught
me a lot about how to work together to achieve common goals. This gave me a fresh perspective while solving complex design problems.
​
2 How to work with existing UI/UX guidelines
Since this was a feature idea for an existing Uber app, we had to work with their existing UI/UX guidelines for all the new user flows, interactions, and look and feel. This was a good learning experience for how to build new interactions in an existing app as I had to consider user's current mental models with the interaction patterns on the app to reduce learning curve for them.
​
3 Understanding users in a better way
We took some decisions considering existing Uber app users will definitely understand certain interactions. Those interactions which we thought were really intuitive, users had a hard time interacting with them to use our feature, and this was the biggest takeaway from user testing process.
THANK YOU :)