Re-comprehending the re-contract.

Users were overwhelming our operations teams. This is how we solved it with design.


My Role

• user research
• interface design
• ux writing


How It Works

Instead of using their personal car for Uber, an Uber driver can rent a car from Fair. This is beneficial to Uber drivers because it prevents wear and tear on their own vehicle (if they have one) or it gives access to a car for someone who don’t have a personal car – as long as they complete a certain number of Uber rides a week.

Once a driver reserves a car on the Fair app, the car is picked up at a local Fair station, where a fleet of Uber-approved Fair cars await their drivers. The car can be rented for up to 4 weeks on a single contract. To continue driving for another 4 weeks, a new contract needs to be signed. All contracts must signed and renewed in the Fair mobile app.


The Problem

Operational Drag
However, “Active” drivers (aka existing drivers) were coming back to Fair stations to renew their contracts for another 4 weeks in person. This additional overwhelmed the staff at Fair stations, affected efficiency, and distracted from their main purpose. Fair stations were established to assist new drivers getting into cars and servicing rental returns.


The Process

Talk to Users
First, I wanted to understand why Active drivers kept coming back to the stations to renew their contracts. So I went to various Fair stations to talk to drivers picking up cars and to staff who were dealing with returning drivers. And there, I made a key discovery…

Almost every driver assumed they knew how it worked already.

Their Mental Model
Drivers came to Fair assuming we worked just like Hertz and Lyft, two other established companies that also rented out cars to rideshare drivers. But at Hertz and Lyft, you had to return to their locations with your car after 4 weeks to inspect it and renew your contract via pen and paper.

Share the Research
This discovery kickstarted an internal campaign to update how we onboarded and educated our users.

At Fair stations, staff members were trained to emphasize to new drivers that “we are different than Hertz and Lyft” – driving home the fact that contract renewals were done on the app. No need to come back to Fair stations (which drivers found inconvenient anyway).


The Solution

As for the Fair app, the most obvious place for us to start rethinking was the Active driver experience.

How could we inform users on what to do in a timely manner?

Pushes and Pops
We decided to create an experience that would allow a user to learn the information that they needed as they went along. We believed the user didn’t necessarily need to know every detail before starting their job. However, it was important for them to know what to do and when to do it. So we designed a push notification and in-app alert experience to re-engage users into the app and let them know that if their contract was about to expire, that they could renew their contract in the app.

 
 
 

Redesign
We also reworked the Active driver page to help users understand their contract by improving information hierarchy, visualizations, and ux copy.

  1. Bring the contract information above the fold.

  2. Add an activity ring to represent an expiring contract.

  3. Add a status badge to indicate to users what the status of their contract was.

  4. Display important dates and costs.

  5. Update the CTA microcopy to be more direct and place the CTA in proximity to the information we wanted users to act on.

 
 

Results

The new emphasis from Fair station staff members on re-establishing mental models for drivers proved to have an immediate impact. Drivers were leaving the Fair stations with a clear idea on what to do when it came to signing a new contract. In the app, as soon as we released, we saw users engaging with the app through the push notifications which introduced them to timely instructions on what to do with their contract leading to more in-app re-contracts and less calls to customer service.


Next Steps

Although we made good improvements, we were still seeing a smaller number of drivers coming back to stations to renew their contracts. This cohort was largely made up of drivers whose native language was not English. To better service every driver no matter their level of fluency in English, our next step was for the app to support the native language of the user.