OVERVIEW
While cab sharing companies like Uber, Ola, Lyft gain popularity there are rising cases of harassment against certain segments of the market, reported and otherwise.
As an automotive OEM, it would be cutting off this problem at its root if we could integrate a safety system in the commercial vehicles, backed by technical support that works in sync with the hardware.
Problem
Increasing harassment and violence in shared rides like Uber Pool and the lack of provisions to handle these situations.
Rephrasing the problem:
How might we holistically address safety concerns in shared rides?
How might we integrate these solutions into Mahindra's vehicles/services?
Duration:
Type:
Team:
Tools:
3 months
Professional
7 trainees
Figma, xCode,
Solution
We build an interlaced hardware- software system to provide gender specific safety options, increase co-rider accountability and a system to , support victims, if/when incidents occurred. The key objective was to increase accountability of each individual in shared rides as it was seen as the best deterrent to abusers and something that was largely missing in the current market.
DESIGN PROCESS
Research
Domain Study
Interviews
Design
Persona Definitions
Customer Journey Map
Hardware
Space Ideation
Software
Form Ideation
Visual Content Definition
Interaction Interfaces Definition
Cognitive Load Reduction
Competitor Analysis
Mapping VOCs
Inception
User Testing
MyRide v1.0
Prototyping
RESEARCH
Of the 3000 sexual assaults reported by Uber last year (2019), 42 percent were on the Uber drivers (a large part of the victims being women) while the remaining 58 percent were on passengers, again mostly women. This statistic helped us arrive at a two conclusions:
Women, both riders and drivers, were the most at risk.
Both riders and drivers are equally at risk.
User Interviews
With a clear demographic to work with, our main objective was to understand the pain points women experience in shared rides. Also, we wanted to verify if and to check if those highlighted in the news reports matched those of the women we directly interview:
"I would never dare request a shared ride after 8 p.m".
"The scariest experience I have had was when the cab driver went off route to pick up a friend of his. It was a shared cab and I didn't understand if my application wasn't updated or I was being kidnapped."
"Because of the number of men in the workforce, most of my shared rides are all with men. It's unnerving because of the incidents I read about."
"I wouldn't have any time to call the helpline if things went south."
"I have been in a sticky situation in a shared ride where I wanted to get out. I was at a location completely off of my route and when I called support I got no help, got charged for the full ride and had to find a different mode of transport."
Pain Points
Unease with being the only woman in the cab
Travel at night is specially arduous
There's a ubiquitous lack of trust in existing support/technology in emergencies
Competitor Analysis
When looking for competitors in this segment, we were quite surprised to find that no other OEM had any in built ecosystem to support safety in commercial vehicles
Companies offering ride shares were the closest competitors in this segment.
QuickRide
-
Allows users to pick co-riders based on gender.
-
Relies on individuals with cars available to offer rides and app's popularity for customers.
-
Very few cabs are actually available.
Uber Support
-
Provides emergency support on dialling emergency contact.
-
Provides a physical emergency button for immediate support.
-
Relies heavily on emergency being non-physical forms of harassment.
-
Large number of complaints on the process being automated with lack of genuine support.
Learnings
-
There's a need for on-site emergency support to address physical forms of harassment
-
Each emergency is different requiring human aid, rather than AI or automated responses to help victims during emergencies
-
Women Do feel safer when the rides are with other women but there's lack of availability.
Personas
Customer Journey Map
The two different personas gave us two different journey maps and demonstrated unique and overlapping pain points of both the personas
DESIGN
At this point, we felt a need to map the voice of customers to understand the overlapping issues and thereby prioritise problems to solve
Design Synthesis
From our research we saw an opportunity to integrate hardware and software to address the pain points of the target population:
With an illustration of the issues faced by the target customer, we launched into ideation and prototyping.
Hardware Design
From our research we saw an opportunity to integrate hardware and software to address the pain points of the target population. To guide our designs during the concept development process, we started with defining two personas.