The story of this project begins 1 day before the start of Hack4Vilnius 2022 when we formed our awesome team of 3 developers, a graphic designer, and me - a UX designer.
I was responsible for everything related to the UX and UI design. We had less than 2 days to create a solution.
Prototypes we created:
The hackathon prompt that we chose sounded like this:
Some of the families take their children to distant schools every morning, requiring them to drive through the city. Create a tool that would allow families to share seats in the car and coordinate a shared schedule for transporting children.
This issue costs parents valuable time, it also causes traffic jams in the entire city. It seemed like an interesting and challenging problem to solve. So, our team was on it!
What can we do to make parents feel as safe as possible while entrusting someone with the most precious thing in their life - their children?
Even though we didn’t have much time, we interviewed some potential users about the problem we were trying to solve and got valuable insights. To give you a better feeling about the problem we were to take on, here are a couple of the most memorable quotes from initial user interviews:
User 1
“It would save me so much time, but I don’t know what it would take for me to trust someone enough to let them drive my kids to school.”
User 2
“I wouldn’t let some random stranger drive my kid. I should know the person, their driving skills, and how safe their car is. There should be a lot of mutual trust, and even then - I’m not sure...”
It soon became clear that the main concern that we should address for this app to work was to ensure safety. What can we do to make parents feel as safe as possible while entrusting someone with the most precious thing in their life - their children?
I won’t lie to you - at first, it seemed almost like a mission impossible to us. No matter what safety measures we considered, nothing seemed enough. But we had our breakthrough.
At first, we started with brainstorming. To address the main concern of safety, we decided to include these safety measures:
1. Live video broadcast of the carpool drive, using only the app and the phone. So the parents can see what is happening inside the car, in front of the car, and how the driver is handling any situation.
2. Videos of the journeys are stored and accessible to the parents in that carpool group for a limited time, in case there is a need to view it after the journey has ended and save it for longer storage.
3. Live tracking on the map, to always know where the carpool car is.
4. The main principle of the app - creating fixed carpool groups so that you know the parents you are carpooling with.
5. The parents are encouraged to get to know each other before suggesting to carpool together. The chat feature is included to make this easier.
6. The identification process for first-time users. You can’t start or join a carpool group without going through the identification process.
7. The driving experience - every profile includes information about the parent’s driving experience.
8. Every profile includes a rating, if there are any problems with the driver (driving, being late, communication - you name it!) – the rating shows it.
9. Possibility to report a parent’s profile.
10. Requiring clear recognizable profile photos in the parent profiles.
11. Getting the main data about the vehicle that would be used in a carpool.
12. Providing information about the requirements of the seats in the car to be suitable for children’s transportation.
Once we knew what must be included to address the main concern of safety, we moved on to user flows, wireframes, and wire flows with all kinds of notes to make sure everything is implemented in the most convenient way for the users.
The user flow did not look this nice and pretty originally. The content was the same, but visually it looked like a drunk cousin of this one (I mean - we only had less than 2 days to do everything!). But it did what it was supposed to do - it refined our ideas and got the whole team on the same page about where we are going with this app.
We created an app called “Carpool” which allows parents easily find the best carpool matches, create carpool groups and schedule the carpool. We built the prototype flow of the first-time users suggesting the carpool to a parent, to showcase the safety measures we included.
Our developers even developed and tested the feature of live video broadcast, managed to build it in such a short time, and showcase this during our presentation! It was a one badass development performance!
We also created a short demo flow of how the main app interface would look like once the carpool group is formed and the carpool is already happening.
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Since this all was a team effort, I can’t possibly NOT show you the team! So, behold - the awesome humans who together make the most fun team to work with in human history!
