HAILO

Improve Passenger Allocation Experience to Reduce Cancellations

Hailo tracked a high number of passenger cancellations during the time we tried to allocate them a driver. The goal for this project was to understand the reasons behind the cancellations and improve our passenger experience by managing their expectations and reassure them that we'd always get them a taxi.

Here's a peek at the before and after Passenger Allocation screen:

CASE STUDY#1

Lead Designer - ios & Android

DISCOVERY

I wanted to start by understanding why passengers were cancelling their taxi requests when waiting for Hailo to allocate them a driver. I wanted to find out what changes could be made to the overall waiting experience and UI, to encourage passengers to wait longer and trust that Hailo would always get them a taxi. 

I set out on the following:

• Worked with the data team to identify how many passengers cancelled jobs during allocation
• Worked with research to send a survey to passengers who cancelled more than once during allocation to analyse their needs and sketch out use cases
• Started thinking of 'what if' scenarios for a better taxi allocation experience 
• Brainstormed work flows alongside the product manager and engineer lead

RESEARCH

After exploring data and analysing the survey results I concluded the following research for my design thinking and validation: 

• Finding ways to keep passengers waiting for longer during allocation - my hypothesis was that if we communicated to passengers what was happening in the background while they were waiting, they would be more likely to wait until a driver accepted the job.
• Creating an experience where passengers feel reassured - if, for example, we invested in conversational design where we explained that we were looking for the most suitable driver, the passenger would trust that we were doing our best. 
• Reviewing allocation screens on competitor products.

SOLUTION

Over the discovery and research period I explored several ideas, doing lots of quick sketching and turned the best concepts into a series of prototypes. I then tested the prototypes internally across the business as Hailoers could give valuable insights. After some iteration and tweaking based on their feedback I created a final prototype which I tested on Hailo passengers.

Here is what I concluded for the final design solution:  

• Passengers thought the previous allocation screen seemed broken because nothing changed after a few seconds, which resulted in high number of cancellations. By adding dynamic conversational messaging that was personable and informative, passengers saw a continuous change on screen and were confident to wait longer because they felt reassured throughout their wait.
• Revised all pop-up messaging that appeared when passengers tried to cancel, making sure they were encouraging and helpful and managed their expectations. 
• Made important UI improvements that further assured passengers not to cancel, for example; included an interactive modal that passengers could swipe through to see their trip details, like their pickup/dropoff location, their payment method and number of seats they requested.  

Here's the final flow:

IMPACT

I worked for 3 weeks on this project and had an immense sense of joy seeing my ideas come to life a few weeks later, when engineers shipped the new allocation experience to our passengers. The data immediately began to show I had solved a variety of problems and together with the team working on this, we achieved our goal of decreasing the number cancellations. 🎉