MATE, carpool app

As a Product Designer, my main responsibility was to define the design direction for MATE carpool as we transitioned from using Kakaotalk messenger to a standalone app.

Challenge

Our team initially offered a carpool matching service to KY University students through a Kakaotalk open chatroom, but as user numbers grew, the process became inefficient and time-consuming.

User surveys led us to the conclusion that a standalone app would be a more efficient and flexible solution for both users and our team. As a result, our main goal became to create a user-friendly app that would surpass the existing Kakaotalk messenger solution.

• The original design was just a page of carpool information, but the team wanted to create a more engaging and positive experience for users. The new design was inspired by bus/train tickets to create an emotional connection to the app.

• Based on user feedback, we found that the most important information for users is time, date, and the fee which you can compare to public transportation.

• Initially, we offered both free and paid services, but users showed more interest in paid services. Therefore, we removed the free service and only kept the paid service, updating the main colour of the number badge to reflect this change.

• To enhance the emotional design, I originally designed a start and end driving button for an app like Uber. However, after user testing, we found that users preferred an automatic end, especially drivers who did not want to click the button multiple times.

• The design was changed to automatically end the carpool at 12 PM and send notifications to both passengers and drivers.

Initial problem discovery

After COVID, there were rising gas and public transportation fees, students were looking for a carpool option to save money and reduce their COVID anxiety during rush hour However, it was difficult to find others who were interested in carpooling or had a car to commute.

User Interview

To understand users' pain points, we executed user interviews in two groups, one for Passengers(13 users) who are looking for someone who can share their car and another for Drivers(4 users) who are looking for someone who wants a ride.

Key Interview questions that I asked for Passengers,

• What’s the process of travelling to school?

• What are the difficulties of going to school (starting at 9:30 am)?

• What are the difficulties while you travel?

• Tell me about how you feel when you travel to school by transit.

• Have you carpooled before MATE?

• How was your carpool experience?

Key questions that I asked Drivers,

• Have you carpooled with people before MATE?

• What’s the difficulty while you are sharing the car with your own?

• What are the most concerns while you travel?

• Tell me about how you feel when you travel to school by car.

User scenarios

From then, I created the user scenario to see the target users’ pain points and behaviours at each step. This helped us to define what they needed and what we needed to focus on.

Opportunities

Passengers -

Drivers -

Based on our understanding of what users need, we developed our ideas and made a list of goals of our app and possible features that can solve users’ pain points

Wireframe

User flow

I started to create a design system to ensure consistency across designs and ease of communication with the PM and engineers