About

Uber is a platform where drivers connect with riders, eaters, restaurants, and grocery stores. Within the platform there is a feature called Uber Reserve, it was released in November 2020 with the goal to book upcoming trips in advance up to 30 days.

The Uber Rider Experience UX team tasked us to explore this feature on both mobile and web platforms. They were mainly curious about how participants would use one platform over the other, as well as understand how participants’ understanding of Uber Reserve aligns with the company’s intent on creating the feature.

Team

Britnie Chin, Dena Sabha, Kerry Horton, & Sebastian Priss

Uber Sponsors

Kendall Avery & Ruby Lin

Duration

September - December 2021

Task

I wanted to start off this project by getting more context I decided the best way to do that was to do an exploratory study through Google forms. This would allow us to quickly gather user data on Uber and Uber Reserve so we could narrow down our research question.

From our survey we got 66 responses, we found that 95.2% of our survey participants had not used Uber Reserve and 90.7% did not know what it was. However, the majority of respondents (56.5%) named going to the airport as a use case for Uber.

Based off of our insights we wanted to further explore:

• Why people have not used Uber Reserve

• How to inform and educate users of less commonly used features on Uber, i.e. Reserve

• Understand mental model of going through Uber Reserve on mobile and desktop interface

Method

We recruited participants on google forms, by sending out the link to public forums to get a wide spread of gender, age, location, and background. We wanted participants who have used Uber within the last 6 months, ensuring they were familiar with the app.

We did a usability test alternating between showing participants the web UI first and then mobile UI, and vice versa mobile UI first then web. I decided it was best to alternate to reduce potential bias, and learning bias so we could fully understand the difference between web and mobile. Usability in this case was the best method, to understand and observe how user interact with Uber Reserve, so we could make recommendations to the Uber team. We decided to interview 10 participants to get a good balance of feedback, and user observations. We ran the sessions remotely over zoom, recording each session and using the think-aloud protocol to understand users’s mental models and probe.

We had each participant perform two tasks for each UI:

• Reserve a ride one week in advance

• Cancel the ride

Results

• Uber Reserve was perceived well as a feature, but the mental model of ‘Uber Reserve’ was not fitting for users since the wording of ‘Reserve’ threw off users.

• Mobile version was mainly preferred since users felt like they were on their phone more. But web version was nice for planning if user was already on their computer planning a trip, or if they wanted a bigger view of the map.

• There were a few inconsistencies between mobile and web amongst users like incorrect text descriptions, fewer features based on location, and how features were displayed.

  • Date and time picker being calendar and then drop down menu was confusing for participants.

  • Viewing reserved trips were also different on web and mobile. Web showed the reservation immediately, whereas mobile you had to dig around and change the filter to ‘future’. Terminology was also confusing as ‘Rides’ and ‘Trips’ were used interchangeably.