OVERVIEW
Make daily transportation experience social
The key purpose of Ride Buddy is to create interaction in stranger situations during your daily commute, especially ride sharing, making a difference to your transportation experience.
The shared ride hailing market, albeit quickly expanding, is far from saturated. In just the US, Europe and China, the market can grow from $300b to $500b by 2030.
Recent reports stressed that mobility needs to get smarter to be sustainable. While we do think Ride Buddy can bring value to everyone(!), the below segments are particularly relevant: the middleclass, single professionals and young people in the big cities.
Ride Buddy Team
Cora Wan, Team Lead
Disha Shah, Chief Art Director
Jessie Fraser, Chief Creative Officer
Pratik Mankame, Chief Innovation Officer
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CHALLENGES
Getting users on board
Through our user tests, we realised that Ride Buddy is a late comer to the car hailing market, thus we'd need to overcome potential user bias due to pre-existing habit and familiarity with the mainstream providers, such as Uber and LYFT.
On the flip side, Covid-19 hammered the rides business of major players, which presents opportunities for new players like us, who are more competitive in engaging and caring for riders' changing needs.
Our team believe that Ride Buddy is unique and has an edge to hack into the existing shared ride hailing market with our first-of-its-kind social-driven UX!
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STRATEGY
Gamify inherently imaginative air-travel wonders
To hack into a crowded ride hailing space, we set focus on the relatively untouched air travel market in the first stage of development. We believe this will get Ride Buddy an elegant entry, gain traction and user familiarity of our interface and brand speedily. Version 1.0 and our eventual carpool game are targeting the exact same group of audience.
Informed by the user personas of our key target audience: the single, middle-class and young people, we have created a gamified social network that presents clear incentive for users to connect for networking, socialising or romance in-flight (we will not define or limit their imagination!).
Our information architecture is such that users will be able to find a Ridy Buddy before or after boarding or selecting their seats. They can scan the QR code all over the airport to access our app, entering their flight details and then locating other users who are also looking for a Ride Buddy.
For more conservative users, our functionalities ensure that they enjoy the liberty to connect with a Ride Buddy only when mutual liking is confirmed.
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We have built Ride Buddy 1.0 with PHP, MySQL and plain JavaScript, giving rise to a fully functioning in-flight social network that allows users to connect and communicate with contacts who are boarding on to the same flight. The level of completion allows us to present this appealing UX idea persuasively to potential partners and investors.
The prototype actualised sophisticated functionalities, albeit being built with plain vanilla coding tools. In hindsight, our well-planned schema of the relational database was a key success factor.
The team came up with coding solution for each landmark functionality one by one. The core function achieved is to let users registered to the same flight, as well as request, confirm and remove connections. We are particularly proud to have made live chat work by designing two ID (personID and profileID) for each user such that the dynamic combination of the two ID can create a unique link that are private to the users in the chatroom.
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See also...|
