Lyft UXR Project
Elevating the college rideshare experience with estimated $20 million ARR boost
Overview
College students are a big opportunity for Lyft—many do not own cars on campus but require mobility. Northwestern’s student consulting group, CASE, worked with Lyft to understand how to increase Lyft's prominence and brand loyalty among students. After conducting extensive user research and market analysis, our team came up with three solutions to address student needs of affordability, safety, speed, and consistency.
Timeline
March - June 2021
(4 months)
Role
UX Researcher
(Design)
Team
2 Product Leads,
4 Design,
4 Marketing
College students do not demonstrate brand loyalty to Lyft
Our team was asked by Lyft to improve their app, with a focus on the payment experience, to increase brand loyalty amongst college students.
Research goals
We needed to first gain a comprehensive understanding of the college student demographic, their ridesharing behaviors, and the pain points they encountered when using the Lyft app. Specifically, our research goals were to:
Understand how college students interact with and perceive the Lyft app
Identify key issues faced by college students using rideshare services
Discover motivational factors behind transportation selection
Research methodology
For this study, we aimed to include a diverse sample of students currently enrolled in 2-year or 4-year colleges. Characteristics of interest included gender, socioeconomic status, rideshare frequency, and residency status (both in-state and out-of-state students).
Four methods of data collection:
Recruitment strategies:
Collecting quantitative data about student rideshare habits
We first distributed a mass survey to college students to quickly gather representative data, which consisted of 20 questions about demographic information, rideshare usage habits, and experiences with ridesharing.
Findings:
24.7% of surveyed students come from low-income households, of which 15% do not use rideshares
Out-of-state (OOS) students use rideshares more than in-state (IS) students, with an average of 4.34 rides per month for OOS compared to 3.72 for IS
Airport rides are a primary use for OOS students, with 38.1% of OOS students noting airport travel as a reason for rideshare use compared to 6.1% of IS
Night rides are a common use case for all students, with 19.7% of students mentioning this reason for rideshares
From our survey, we identified first-generation, low-income (FGLI), and OOS students as a growing demographic. We defined low-income households as those earning less than $50k for a family of four (nccp.org).
Hearing stories
A subset of the survey respondents were then selected to partake in either a usability study or a consumer psych interview. Lastly, we conducted a final round of informal interviews to further understand FGLI OOS student needs. In total, we conducted 35 interviews with each being 30-minute, one-on-one sessions.
Usability studies: users interacted with a mock Lyft interface to identify specific areas of frustration or improvement in the app.
Consumer psychology interviews: conversations to understand motivations behind transportation options and Lyft’s brand perception.
Follow-up target audience interviews: conversations to identify transportation issues more prominent amongst FGLI OOS students.
Sample questions and usability tasks
As a design member, my responsibilities included drafting the usability study guide and conducting usability studies and follow-up interviews. Using a TEDW framework, we began usability studies with open-ended questions that led to natural conversations, allowing us to understand user pain points without leading participants.
Could you tell me about the modes of transportation that you mostly use?
Can you describe the last time you called a rideshare?
Can you explain why you chose [option] to be your default payment method?
Pretend you’re going to request a ride to your friend’s house now. Can you walk me through how you think through that?
When it came to the walkthrough portion of the usability study, we had users simulate the process of connecting a payment method to a Lyft account and ordering a ride to a destination. We prompted participants to talk through each step in detail.
Connect this debit card to your Lyft account.
Add an additional destination to your ride.
Split the fare with another passenger.
Leave your driver a tip and a rating.
Interviews revealed three major pain points
It’s difficult to find people to split rides with
Students want to split expensive rides to far locations, especially when out late at night, but have trouble finding others to split with.
“I don’t ever call a ride from the airport to campus because it’s way too expensive, but I’d definitely consider it if I had people to split the ride with.”
Splitting ride fares is a tedious process
Students want a more straightforward method of splitting payments since payments through third-party payment apps can be unreliable.
“I wish the app had an easy way to split payments because I always have to Venmo request people to pay me, and sometimes they do not pay me back.”
Not enough transparency on tipping and charging
Students are uncertain about the breakdown of their ride cost and when they will be charged during the ride process.
“That’s my main source of discomfort with [rideshare] apps, I’m not really sure where my money is going.”
College students value…
From looking at our survey and interview data together, we identified four key student values when choosing transportation:
Affordability
Safety
Survey results showed that price was the number one factor in determining which transportation method students would use.
Ridesharing and driving were considered much safer than public transportation, biking, and walking, especially at night.
Speed
Consistency
Students want to reach destinations as quickly as possible. Short wait-times until pickup were just as important as overall ETA.
Students desire a reliable transportation method with predictable arrival and departure times.
Humanizing our data
We created personas to represent our findings thus far:
Resourceful Rachel, is an OOS, low-income student at Northwestern who wants to find reliable ride-sharing partners so that she can minimize transportation costs and ensure that expenses are shared fairly.
We also created a secondary persona, Trendy Tyler who is an OOS, high-income student at UVA, to represent a different user segment within the college student demographic.
Rachel’s ridesharing journey
By mapping out Rachel’s user journey to book a shared ride from the airport, we highlighted key areas of payment frustration.
Feature proposals
Our team came up with three recommended features for the Lyft app:
1. University Group Matching
The University Group Matching feature provides a streamlined process of coordinating rides with other verified students in the vicinity to shared destinations, addressing student needs for safety and affordability.
To use the feature, students must first verify their university status using their student email and enrollment years. Once verified, students can select a Shared University ride and match with other students.
2. Group Ride QR Code
By enabling users to create ridesharing groups, the QR Code feature allows riders to both keep a history of who they rode with and simplify the cost-splitting process.
This solution eliminates the need for separate calculations and splitting and overcomes the obstacle of losing contact with ridesharers and not getting paid back
3. Payments Redesign
Many users from our interviews mentioned that they would like to see a percentage tip amount instead of just a dollar amount. Furthermore, they wanted transparency on how much more or less they would be charged when adding a stop or changing destinations.
A redesign of the payments process to break down the total ride cost and provide transparency on how much of the tip to the driver would reassure users about their purchase.
Type
Student Project
Estimated $20 million in total added annual revenue
Of the three features, the university group matching was found to have the highest profitability and viability. Through market analysis, we estimated that:
There were 1,120,000 low-income OOS students currently in the market.
Of the 15% that did not rideshare at all, half would start using group matching for airport rides, leading to a total of 84,000 new low-income OOS Lyft riders.
3% of all infrequent student riders (<2 rides/month) would begin using group matching for non-airport rides, for an additional 150,000 new student Lyft riders.
Reflections
This project marked my initial venture into UX, sparking my curiosity for further exploration. Working with a diverse team revealed crucial insights about effective collaboration and problem-solving:
Teamwork showed the value of clear communication and flexibility. Regular team meetings and shared documentation ensured that everyone was on the same page. We split tasks based on our strengths and managed to efficiently complete deliverables, with team members stepping in to fill in others’ responsibilities when needed. Through our team-wide ideation session, we harnessed the power of different viewpoints to generate a wide range of feature ideas.
Thorough user research is the bedrock of meaningful solutions. Analyzing survey results highlighted patterns, and conducting interviews revealed personal anecdotes that guided our design decisions. For instance, while survey data indicated a preference for easy navigation, interviews revealed that real users struggled with specific aspects of the app's interface.
Lastly, presenting our findings to a Lyft project manager was an illuminating experience. Her feedback provided a fresh perspective and pushed us to think beyond the obvious solutions. This exercise mirrored real-world scenarios, showing how the input of stakeholders can shape the direction of a project.