Validating Product Concept

The qualitative and quantitative research demonstrated that riders can and will make trade-offs between the inconveniences and benefits of uberPOOL. Riders will accept certain levels of inconvenience such as extended trip length, trip variability, waiting, and walking in return for a lower price and a more direct route. This is because these factors are not foreign concepts and are common across rider’s existing travel experience. For example, riders might already walk a few blocks when ordering an Uber for a more convenient pickup. Since aspects of this were already evidence on Uber and other transportation services, the concept was not a far departure from rider’s current reality. Therefore, the crucial takeaway was in defining what rider’s might expect as an acceptable price in order for them to accept such inconveniences.

Originally, the team was concerned that riders would not be willing to make upfront trade-offs for an improved on-trip experience, such as having a more direct route, but this was not the case. Research demonstrated that some riders do weigh upfront costs, such as effort in pre-planning, to ensure that they have a more ideal travel experience. The team was able to further validate this take-away, showing riders stated preference to wait and walk for a lower price and a faster trip.

The conjoint helped confirm that users find the new value proposition compelling. This confidence was crucial to help align the team on the concept that it was worthwhile to undergo such a massive engineering effort to change the existing uberPOOL product. The mixed-method research approach also provided the team in-person experience with riders, understanding how existing and potential users might perceive the concept. Overall, this grounded team members on the most likely product challenges and helped capture and address concerns of user adoption.

Forming the Narrative on Affordability

The conjoint demonstrated that rider utility increases with lower cost more quickly than disutility increases with inconvenience. Unsurprisingly, it showed how lower price is one of the most important benefits. This was a key strategic piece of evidence for prioritizing the lowest possible cost with uberPOOL that the team was mandated to own and lead efforts towards affordability, driving down price through innovative efficiency solutions.

This evidence not only helped the team identify the significance of price discounts in driving opt-in, but also helped put the magnitude of this business goal into perspective. The conjoint was used repeatedly during offsites, vision exercises, and planning sessions to demonstrate the ideal level of price discounts that the team needed to accomplish. This provided an early signal inspiring the team on the potential growth that could be unlocked. This excitement was shared across various Rider teams, product orgs, and executives on the future of uberPOOL, establishing buy-in and alignment from across the company.

This research demonstrated the power of lower prices, which led the team to put affordability front and center in marketing the product. The team utilized this learning to create a series of marketing claim tests to identify the best messaging. The theme of affordability proved to resonate the most with customers, and the team iterated on numerous concepts to help emphasize this benefit. As such, Express POOL was launched with the focus on savings with the final product tagline ‘walk a little, save a lot’ to communicate the slight trade-off as evidenced through our research. Media outlets described it as “Uber Express Pool offers the cheapest fares yet in exchange for a little walking.” (Hawkins, 2018)

Pricing Decisions

The team was able utilize the conjoint estimates on product opt-in to set realistic, rider-driven pricing and product targets during the development phase and beyond. The team used the conjoint to ‘simulate’ different configurations of waiting and walking and identified what was an acceptable price point to offset the additional inconvenience.. The team utilized these findings to sanity check pricing to ensure they were not offering an unbalanced product-market fit. For example, with certain levels of walking and waiting, the team utilized the conjoint to get a rider’s perspective whether prices would need to go up or down to get a more compelling Express POOL opt-in.

Prior to conducting this research, walking and waiting were previously discussed mostly through the lens of how it affects Uber’s ecosystem. Experiential concerns and user metrics, such as opt-in or user feedback, were often delayed inputs measured after product launch. With this new approach the team was able to include users’ preferences when setting prices and product parameters Therefore, the conjoint provided estimated rider elasticities that enabled the team to configure the initial launch of the product while also informing subsequent experimentation. With this input, the team was able to discuss product parameters and prices with a more balanced and user-centered approach.

Non-Walking Option

Through this research, the team acquired a nuanced understanding on walking as a trade-off. Segmentation analysis on the conjoint results validated the team’s hypotheses that riders have varying sensitivities around walking and waiting, which are influenced by travel conditions and alternatives. As such, walking is not considered uniformly at the same cost across all riders. Rather, its importance fluctuates depending on the rider and the context. The uberPOOL product team recognizes that walking is one of the biggest parameters to balance, because it can provide meaningful efficiency gains to the product experience, but needs to be considerate towards riders with varying walking capability and desires.

This insight around walking ability influenced the team on uberPOOL’s product strategy and decision to maintain a non-walking option available to riders at launch. The team identified a subset of riders for whom walking was a great burden and the qualitative research showed the importance of having riders who are motivated to walk and wait, but also able to complete the walking task. Both research inputs identified how divisive walking can be for users, and as a result, the product team believed it was critical to maintain a non-walking shared rides option at product launch.

Translating Conjoint trade-offs into the Product Experience

The team wanted to be faithful to the survey method and translate the trade-offs into the product experience. In a conjoint survey, trade-offs are explicitly described in textual format. However, it is challenging when translating this trade-off into a product experience. As such, the product and design team iterated on numerous ways to communicate the walking and waiting trade-offs throughout the product design.

In terms of walking distance, the conjoint survey utilized a ‘blockwise’ terminology to indicate the amount of walking that the rider might be expected to do. The respondent was presented choices of ‘walk 1 block,’ ‘walk 2-3 blocks,’ or ‘no walking’ in the conjoint survey. However, the product and engineering team believed that engineering requirements to visually create and communicate such specificity was rather complex. As a result, designers brainstormed on numerous versions and went through rounds of usability testing for potential designs to communicate walking.

An important consideration in going through this design process is assessing the ‘specificity’ and ‘usefulness’ that the product and engineering team is able to provide for riders. A circular radius, as depicted below in several design explorations, aimed to communicate the potential walking radius with the potential pickup points to meet their driver. These designs portrayed the spatial area of walking for the rider, did not prove to be useful when selecting their product. In many cases, riders perceived the walking trade-off to be much larger than reality or misinterpreted information about pickup locations.

Figure 10. Sample design explorations to communicate spatial trade-offs for walking.

Designers and engineers ideated and created a more engineering complex approach, but believed in investing to better communicate spatial trade-offs for users. The team believed that walking, a critical piece of the user experience, should be useful in helping riders make their trade-offs. As such, the team finalized on a ‘bounding box’ design that best illustrated the realistic spatial trade-offs for a rider, that received great results from usability tests and after product launch.

Figure 11. End-to-end Designs of Express POOL – Uber’s new shared ride experience with walking and waiting. Designs as of Nov 2017.