
Flipping the Script on Short Distance Travel with Electric Scooters
Dockless electric scooter rentals powered by the Uber App
STAKEHOLDER UBER
THE CHALLENGE
Design the safest scooter rental experience that can convince local legislature to grant Uber operating permits over its competitors in battleground markets such as Santa Monica and Austin.
IMPACT
Uber was the first company to receive a permit from the City of Los Angeles to operate scooters. Additionally, we asked our user base to rate their scooter experience and in the first 4 weeks we received over 1400 responses with an average rating of ~80%. Lastly, 90% of trips were compliant with the city's parking mandate which we attribute to our strategic placement of in-app education.
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THE OUTCOME
Scooters were quickly adopted for their ability to better service short distance trips in high density markets that would have been too far to walk but not long enough to justify taking ride share.
MY ROLE
Lead designer to a team of 3 responsible for supporting all scooter UX/UI/UXR needs.
Additional responsibilities: Conducting user research, requirements gathering, cross organizational collaboration, stakeholder management, physical scooter branding, rapid prototyping, and visual design.

Uber is innovating new mobility hardware to make it safer and easier for people to choose bikes and scooters over cars
CONDUCTING USER RESEARCH
11 Interviews across 3 markets

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DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Setting the New Mobility team's foundation

STORY BOARDING
Building user empathy through visual storytelling

UBER'S FIRST QR SCANNER
Designing what does not yet exist


USER JOURNEY
What does the current experience look like?

DESIGN FOR SAFTEY
Emphasizing rider safety and parking compliance


PHYSICAL SCOOTER BRANDING
Beyond just digital product design (In collaboration with the Brand team)


SOLVING THE MAP PROBLEM
And adding some surprise and delight

MAP CLUSTERING
A problem that we learned really fast was when there are hundreds of scooters within a small area, the map interaction becomes really clunky—almost to the point of being unusable. The way we approached solving this fundamental issue was by creating 3 levels of smart clustering.
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Street Level
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​Neighborhood Level
- ​City Level (Easter Egg)​

KEY RESULTS
Measuring the team's success

HOW'D WE DO?
Uber was the first company to receive a permit from the City of Los Angeles to operate a mix of up to 3,000 scooters and e-bikes. It could be speculated that our emphasis on rider safety and compliance made us the favorite when comparing the different scooter company applications. Within the first 4 weeks of the pilot we got over 1425 responses from users, of which ~80% were satisfied with our end-to-end experience.
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150k+ weekly trips (Jun 2019)
Expanded from 2 to 15 cities (including international), -
Utilization at 5 trips per day.
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~90% Parking Compliance
PRESS
FEATURED IN
