Project Overview

Growing up in one of the largest, most dense cities in the world fostered within me a fascination with the interactions that humans have on a daily basis. I’ve had the privilege of being tasked to propose a new feature or product that can enable Lyft to scale positive impact on the communities we serve.

To start off, I would like to state Lyft’s mission:

“Our mission is to reconnect people through transportation and bring communities together.”

Throughout this assignment, it is important to keep the overarching mission of Lyft at the top of mind. This will help guide the design process, decisions, tradeoffs, and overall solutions.

I would like to start off with giving an overview of the transportation industry.

Transportation Industry at a Glance

To better formulate an idea on what direction I wanted to take with the assignment, I decided to start with a high-level overview of what the transportation industry looks like and then work my way down to a specific niche, depending on what direction made sense to pursue.

The transportation industry is comprised of the following sectors:

During my process of deciding which sector I believe Lyft could disrupt, I decided to eliminate the ones that were totally out of scope. For example, Air, Rail, Water, Truck, Warehouse, Pipeline did not stand out to me, due to the fact that Lyft operates as a transportation network company that provides ground transportation to users and some of these sectors have higher barriers to entry.

That being said, the five categories that did stand out were:

From the selection above, it’s important to take into consideration the barriers to entry and any drawbacks from pursuing the opportunity. This is what I gathered:

• For some industries above, I could see a barrier to entry. For example, the postal services may have rules and regulation in which Lyft would have to go through a lengthy legal process to operate within the industry. To minimize the cost and the time to break into the sectors, I believe that this is fully out of scope.

• As far as the scenic and sightseeing transportation, I believe it does align with the core vision of bringing communities together. However, I do believe that that the market size in comparison to the various other sectors, is not large enough. Scenic & sightseeing only amounts 5% of the size of the Support Activities sector in terms of employment. Using that as a proxy for gauging market size, I decided to not pursue this specific sector because Support Activities, and Couriers/Messenger are much bigger.

Lyft is already in Transit/ground transportation, so that leaves us with Support Activities and Couriers/Messengers transportation sectors. I believe that these two industries could provide the most opportunity for Lyft in terms innovation and barriers of entry.

Analyzing Support Activities for the Transportation Sector

For context, this industry provide services which support transportation. These services may be provided to transportation carrier establishments or to the general public. This subsector includes a wide array of establishments, including air traffic control services, laborers and freight, material movers, and motor vehicle towing.

When closely analyzing these services within this sector, a few pain points/gaps came to me:

• There is no eco-friendly and affordable alternative to material movers and short-distances delivery services on the market (Material Movers include furniture and light-weight package services, unwanted household goods, packing materials, etc.). I specifically say eco-friendly because shipment of products is actually providing more harm to the environment then good. (Source: https://www.vox.com/2017/11/17/16670080/environmental-cost-free-two-day-shipping)

• Due to the increase in demand, there will be a lack of transportation to provide services for short-distance deliveries, freight, and moving services. This will force companies to invest more money into extra cars, which will have a negative impact on Lyft’s mission to reduce carbon emission.

I believe that these are the top two pain points for the industry as a whole. Lyft could have significant impact on solving these two problems for the industry and to further my assignment, I will dive deeper into some a few solutions for the issues.

Formulating a direction

By framing the pain points and goals into questions, I get a better understanding of how to go about tackling the issues at hand.

From this, I formulated three questions:

Question 1: How can we provide an eco-friendly and affordable alternative to material movers and delivery services?

Question 2: How can we mitigate the production of extra service vehicles and reduce the carbon emission?

Question 3: How can we foster larger sense of community for our riders and passengers?

After pondering the question and comprehending the pain points, I have a came up with various solutions that we could potentially push forward with:

• Provide a delivery service for packages and items within their region

• Provide furniture & freight delivery service for our riders

• Provide long distance delivery of products for our riders

• Provide moving services for our riders

All of the above solutions helped me land on my concept. I’ve came down to one solution that I believe solves the issues and aligns with Lyft’s goals to bring community together:

Delivering a product that provides an eco-friendly and affordable delivery service, all while fostering a strong connection with driver and passenger.

Before we hop into the details of the product, I want us to get a better understanding on exactly who we are providing this product for.

Placing the user at the center of process

Based on a typical city-dweller in major cities, this is what they may look like:

Meet Adam!

Now that we have established who are target user is, we can dive into the product proposal.

Proposed Solution

Product Requirements

My proposed solution would be to create a platform that will allow users to find immediate help with everyday tasks such as moving furniture from one location to the next or picking up a couch they bought on facebook marketplace.

Name: Lyft Transport

Goals: Delivering a product that provides an eco-friendly and affordable delivery service, all while fostering a strong connection with driver and passenger.

Cost: The cost of building the new feature, and constant ideation/updating of the product. Depending on the types of drivers that are currently using our product, we might have to invest the acquisition of users who are willing to perform the task. To lower the cost of marketing to passengers, I believe that sending out emails to our passengers would be the more feasible decision to make.

Requirements

• Add a new icon to the homepage of the passenger view

• When the user clicks on the button, build out new landing page for pickup/delivery options

• Build a search bar at the top of the landing page and two buttons labeled “Delivery” and “Pick-up”

• Once either button is clicked, build a “Pick-up” destination interface that shows the map of the region with a module to search a destination. Also, build a text box where users will be able to provide specific instructions on the task

• Build a button that states “Confirm & Continue.” Once they click the button, then build a drive type selection which includes the type of car and price. Also, build out the payment module where users can change and confirm their payment information

• Finally, build a button that finalizes the process of requesting a task

User Journey

The user journey is quite simple. The user will open their Lyft application and they will prompted with the homepage. The user could then press on the task button, to the left of the referral button. From there, the user would have the option to choose what kind of task is it (ex. moving furniture or food shopping) and if they want it picked up for a specific place or delivered from their location. They will then be able to input the pick destination for the item and list out any specific instructions they may have. Then, they will click the “Confirm” button at the bottom and they will also have the option to choose their ride type (ex. smaller items for normal cars, bigger items for bigger cars).

Although this is a new feature, I wanted to find a way to incorporate it into the existing design to mitigate the users adoption of the new product.

Now that we have formulated a solution, I would like to dive deeper on how are going to figure a go-to-market strategy for the product.

Launching the new product

Launching this product to the right target audience, in a targeted region, at the right time is vital to the success of the product. The approach that we need to take in order to launch this product is gradually roll it out with A/B testing.On one version of the product, we will roll the first version with the proposed design in the assignment and the the other version would have a different UI. Reason being is because users tend to get frustrated by change, we need to know what UI layout reduces confusion and increases adoption.

Now we need to clarify who the target user is and location of launch along with the strategy to get target user in target location.

Target groups:

1. 18–30 year old, live in a city

2. 18–30 year old, lives in the suburbs

3. 30+ years old, who lives in a city

4. 65+ years old, who lives in the suburbs

Out of these four options, I will go with targeting Option 1. Reason being is because 18–30 year olds will find themselves relocating more often than someone who is 30+ with a family. I am also assuming that most 18–30 year olds do not own a car, especially if they live in a city, where the majority of the time it’s expensive to own and park a car.

From a marketing standpoint, creating marketing campaigns within a major city would be ideal to target new users to our new product. This can be published through all social media outlets such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter because these outlets are most visited by our target age and region.

Now that we have figured out that we will roll out the new feature in an A/B testing method with different UI’s to 18–30 year olds living in a major city (ex. New York, San Francisco), I want to talk more about what metrics we would observe to target the success of the product.

Measuring Success

I would measure the success of this product in three major components:

• Awareness

• Usage

• Retention

Let’s look into these three components!

Awareness

One of the key indicators of the success of the product is if the user is aware of it. If the user is not aware of the new task feature, they will simply not use it. It is important that we measure the percentage of people who click on the task icon on the main screen. This will be a great indicator on whether or not people are aware of the feature (this will give perspective on how we should rearrange the UI).

Usage

A good way to measure the frequency of use is with daily active users (DAU).

For this feature to work, there needs to be drivers available to meet the demand of users for the service. I would measure the average number of available drivers per task request. I would also be looking for a good balance such that the number of drivers and user requests should not exceed the other by a long-haul.

It is crucial that the experience of the user is smooth on their first use. This leads me to think that I should also measure the wait time of their task request. On top of that, I should also measure the cancellation rate of drivers on task requests.

I do believe that measuring the feedback that they leave the drivers is crucial as well. We want to know if the driver is acting in a professional manner when dealing with their personal belongings.

Retention

Measuring the amount of users who use the product once and then come back is crucial to the success of the product. I would also measure how often the user comes back to the service. Ideally, we’d want a shorter time span from when they initially use until the next time they engage with the product.

Conclusion | Long-term Vision

To summarize, I broke down the the sectors of the transportation industry and I chose the “Support Activities” sector because it had the most potential for us to innovate and lower barriers to entry compared to other sectors.

Then, I focused on the specific pain-points/gaps within the sector and I found that there was no eco-friendly and affordable alternative to material movers and short-distance delivery services on the market. I also found that due to the increase in demand, there will be a lack of transportation to provide services for short-distance deliveries, freight, and moving services. This will force companies to invest more money into extra cars, which will have a negative impact on Lyft’s mission to reduce carbon emission.

From this, I formulated a solution to deliver a product that provides an eco-friendly and affordable delivery service, all while fostering a strong connection with driver and passenger.

Although there will have to be undergo a few ideations of the product, to get the processes and UI correct; I believe that this product has the potentially to revolutionize the way we interact with one another. A few thoughts on where we can take this product is by offering a food delivery service to our users as well. It will look like this:

Users will not only be able to request furniture/moving services but they will be able to request a driver to go pick up groceries at the nearest food shop.

Think about a world where you can request someone from your neighborhood to help you with moving furniture from point A to point B. I believe that this will be the next step in bringing Lyft’s ecosystem of users together and a step forward in saving our planet by reducing carbon emission.

Closing Remarks

It’s always awesome working on assignments that allow you to the think outside the box. During the project, I focused primarily on articulating my thought process when tackling problems and new initiatives.

Not only did this project allow me to practice and formulate my design process but it also allowed me to gain valuable skills such as competitive analysis, go-to-market strategy, and defining the right success metrics.