Mytaxi Driver Registration

2016, Product Designer, Mobile & Web

As the biggest taxi hailing app in Europe & South America, mytaxi (rebranded to FREE NOW) (incl. Beat, Kapten & Clever Taxi) has several million app downloads, over 15 million users and more than 100.000 drivers on the streets. The service is available in more than 100 cities across 13 countries. I joined mytaxi in 2015 as an additional force to build up the design department. As a small team of 2 designers, we managed to sharpen awareness of good product design, to grow the design team, to take over responsiblity for more than 10 products and to push product innovation.

Getting to know
the problem

There are multiple paths for potential taxi companies or individual drivers to join mytaxi.

They can send a basic form via the mytaxi website, call the driver service or service center or walk into the driver service office. Each of those possibilities results in a huge manual effort for the driver service employee. Registration processes are out-dated, slow and lack automation. By definition, we have 3 types of interest groups – self-employed drivers, taxi companies and employed drivers – which all have different requirements for registration. Therefore potential drivers/taxi companies must be accompanied throughout the whole registration process by the driver service. This can take up to 30 minutes per registration, 1-2 hours a day or 2-5 full days a month for each employee (depending on the type). Communication goes back and forth until all information is gathered and the candidate can be sent to driver training. Apart from consuming a massive amount of time, this registration process makes the department less effective in other important tasks by diverting their focus.

Deriving the challenges

There are always plenty of challenges when working on transitioning established processes. Changing or transforming such an process, like in this case, does not just affect one country or one single city. It affects the whole european market, and has to uphold each country’s individual standards. As such, this project requires input from multiple stakeholders from various countries and markets. Aligning this information is crucial in the design and development process in order to fulfill the market needs. All gathered information must lead up to a great user-oriented experience and allowing the user to easily walk through the registration process on their own.

Setting the goals

Time consuming tasks, which can be easily transformed, are major indications of inefficiency. One goal was to merge, digitalize, and therefore speed up, several steps to relieve driver services from the manual workload. By pushing the work from executional purposes to quality assurance and monitoring tasks, the effort can be cut by nearly 90%.

However, this optimizational approach concentrating on an easy and convenient way for users to experience our registration process carries one big risk – there is no longer individual and personal contact for the new users in the crucial first steps of registration. Personal contact and availability is one of the major key values of mytaxi. Therefore it was a goal for us to ensure and promote proximity to our future drivers and taxi companies.

Getting ready

We gathered as much information as possible by interviewing all involved stakeholders in 7 countries about their experiences and processes regarding the registration procedure.

Furthermore, we created a comprehensive competitor analysis. Both parts are essential for market analysis and research, to set the standards and match the individual needs. Organizing all given information into mandatory steps helped me to structure my design decisions and to provide a reasonable and understandable user experience. We defined a MVP, which allows us to speed up the development process, lower the risks of failure, test/monitor user churn as well as user behavior and receive feedback by our target group and stakeholders. We broke down the flow into 6 steps and developed a full flow for 1 interest group (self-employed drivers). This would give us enough data and insights to proceed in evolving the registration feature step by step.

Back to basic

Soon I began with one of the most significant steps in my process – scribbling. It offers a great way to express ideas without the fear of failure. It also allows all participants to evaluate ideas and add new thoughts.

I kept the communications between design and development short to gain the ability of fast iterative steps. This ensures that we can ship the MVP on time and can overcome obstacles quickly.

Outcome

After the first scribbles and wireframes, I started designing the actual screen flow. This involved working closely with all stakeholders and the development department. The following screens are the result of multiple iterations.

First insights

By gathering the first analysis data, we quickly identified parts of this feature which seem to be misleading, unclear or not obvious enough. For example: We noticed that 60% of the users that started the first screen of the registration process were not reaching the second page of the flow. That is a remarkable drop. The reason for that was ridiculously obvious. Normally users fill in the log in data and press the log in or sign in button. By looking at our log in screen most users accidently pressed the sign up button instead because it was highlighted and situated at the bottom of the input fields. After pressing the button, they recognized their mistake and would cancel the registration. As a result, we created an alternative version to emphasize the existing options and highlight the primary action. Those mistakes can happen and we should learn from them to constantly improve the quality of our features.

Driver management tool

After the development department finished the in-app registration for both operating sytems (Android & iOS), I started working on the implementation of a monitoring flow into our existing driver management tool (web). Goal was to show all incoming registrations (for all 3 types) and allow the driver service to edit and approve data. After approving all information the driver service can contact the prospect to make an appointment for driver training. The performance of all drivers who were set active after the process are temporary monitored. Therefore we can ensure the best quality for our customers. Based on the web implementation the driver service is able to monitor and help every prospect through each step of the process until he/she is a fully approved mytaxi driver/taxi company. Unfortunately I am not allowed to show any screen flow of the process due to an agreement.

Conclusion

The biggest problem was to sharpen the awareness of the driver service employees to communicate the new feature to potential drivers. The new feature wasn’t consistently promoted, which was why it started slowly in the first week after release. In the meantime, registrations for self-employed drivers via app are increasing by 50-60% on a weekly basis (drivers converting from interested/pending to active). The ratio of manual registrations (office, phone, web) and in-app registrations changed to 2:1. To observe a clear effect on the manual effort, we need to let this feature evolve over time and gather more data. Afterwards, we will be able to draw clear conclusions. We created a foundation to continue our work and improve the mytaxi registration process for all 3 types to registrants. Therefore, it is inevitable to proceed with A/B & Usability testings to reduce the user churn and enhance the conversation rate. As a result, we achieved the intended positive shift from execution to monitoring.

“It was a complex project with several challenges. Alex helped us with his great sense of humour and positive attitude to streamline the process and ship a comprehensive product. It was super fun to work with him.”

Frank Alexander Szyperrek

Design Manager

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