Uber is an on-demand point to point to taxi service. A user can book an Uber taxi from anywhere to anywhere at any time. It also provides great earning platform for drivers/car owners as it creates a great demand for their cars.

Personas
Drivers Owners:
Behavior: Uses Uber, Lyft & other competitors simoltaneously. Use one at a time considering surge prices, commission amount, day’s number of rides /per platform etc
Pain Point: Boring to drive all day. No proper break time. Uber commissions are getting higher and resulting in less earning.
Regular Taxi services users: Regular users are: office goers, patients such as: pregnant women, diabetic patients (& others who visits hospital regularly), students (Based on personal observation)
Behaviour: Need a comfortable and safe ride from point A to point B. Finds the best prices across different platforms and books a taxi.
Paint Point: Do not want to pay surge prices

I would like to focus on increasing the repeat usage rate/loyalty for regular service users. Which may also reduce churn rate. This can be done by introducing marketing strategies and tweaking the platform a little bit for better user experience.

To increase loyalty:
1. We can introduce Monthly no-surge Passes between 2 locations. This will help the office goers immensely.
2. We can tie up with enterprises to provide no-surge passes/discount coupons and cut a deal with them. Find top cities for Uber. We can find which enterprise employees use cabs most based on pick up/drop loations and target 5-10 companies/per city first. and then target the other companies.

To make the process faster/UX better:
1. Users who purchase such passes will just have to press one button based on the GPS location ( Go home or GO Office). Pick up and drop location need not be provided everyday by the user.

Prioritization: As this involves mostly marketing, and tech enhancements we can start immediately on both. While the marketing team advertises and sales team reaches out to different enterprises, the tech team will be able to complete the UX change as it is a very small change and will not take many man hours.

Analytics to track: We can track Daily user activity, bounce rate to track the success of the efforts.

Let me give a high level overview of my understanding of Uber (this might be optional)

What is the purpose of Uber?

– Ride app- Its a location based mobile app that lets customers (riders) get rides with a private driver.

Who is the user of Uber?

It has two types of users – people who need rides and people who drive Uber cars.

High level features for riders
-Guaranteed ride – A rider is guaranteed a ride within a predictable time to their desired destination.
-Tracking – The rider can even track the driver as he/she is en-route to pick the rider.
-Cashless – The rider does not need to pay with cash/credit card. The payment is known up-front and is the rider’s Uber account is charged after the ride is completed.
-Feedback – Uber lets the rider leave feedback for the driver for driving, cleanliness, behavior etc so that the experience can be improved over time
Safe – Uber does background checks of drivers and guarantees the safety of the Uber rider (this has been in question lately with customers complaining about crimes/assaults during Uber rides)

High level features for driver

– Crowd-sourced drivers- Anyone can sign up as a driver as long as they have a safe driving record and no criminal record
– Flexible work hours – A driver can have flexible working hours
-Flexible earning – A driver can make as much money as they want based on hours they drive and rides they take

What can be done to improve Uber
AT this point – we may ask the interviewer what the purpose of the improvement should be? If they ask you to make an assumption, you can say – Given all the exposure that Uber has come under with customers complaining about safety issues with Uber, I would recommend focusing on the user segment – rider and trying to solve for their compromised safety perception of Uber

1. Enforce use of go-pro cameras in all Uber vehicles

2. Create a camera vision model which uses supervised and unsupervised learning (over time) to learn about suspicious behavior, unsafe- situations. Use existing police surveillance tapes, home surveillance tapes (shared by customers) as data input to the model.

3. Have real life alerts to cops and Uber customer service when the model detects potential crime happening. Rider’s cell phone would be called and the driver’s cell phone would be called immediately to confirm if something is happening (by Uber’s customer service). The ML algo would learn and get better with false positives over time.

4. Also add a “safety” feedback section in the feedback section of the app for drivers and riders so that self reported data can be collected. This data can be prejudiced about if a pattern emerges with negative feedback about a certain driver/passenger – they can be blacklisted.

Metrics to measure improvement:
Measure feedback from customers about perception of safety (similar to NPS) with the installation of the camera and the addition of feedback section about safety
This would not have direct monetary impact on Uber’s revenue stream but the need of the hour is the perception of the company and this gesture will go a long way in improving that