Usability Evaluation of Ride Sharing App for Drivers

Statement of the Problem

Introduction

The improvement of the metropolitan social economy, the transport demand of urban inhabitants keeps increasing, and the challenge of getting a taxi is becoming more intense. Taxi is one of the significant players in metropolitan rush hour gridlock, be that as it may, the transport capacity and request at off-peak and peak hours do not often match. Because of the huge operating expense, taxis are often empty during off-peak hours whereas in the peak hours, it is frequently hard to book a taxi in light of the fact that a greater number of cabs just convey one passenger at a time.

The conventional taxi ride-sharing attitude might cause exorbitant increase in the travelers' travel cost and time. For ride-sharing cabs, it enjoys the benefits of smart planning, scheduling and route selection, which can offer more sensible expenses and lessen the overall operating expenses, in order to enhance the excitement of the drivers and travelers, utilize traffic resources more reasonably, diminish the discharge of tail gas, ensure the protection of environment, and advance the sustainable improvement of metropolitan traffic. 

A decent transportation framework is essential for any decent and modern society. Metropolitan life will be deplorable and unacceptable without a decent, reasonable and safe transportation framework. At present, ridesharing services have become more famous compared to public transportation and lease a-vehicle/taxi services in various urban areas of the globe. Ridesharing services are associated with solace, ease and comfort while driving through the very populated urban areas on the planet. Among many, the most famous ridesharing applications include Uber, Taxify, Bolt, and Didi (Rashid, 2018).

Statement of the Problem

There are various past studies with respect to collaboration design for drivers. A new pattern in auto in-vehicle design is the incorporation of touch screens. As the display in a vehicle expands, it incorporates an expanding measure of functionality (Rümelin and Butz, 2013). Contact or touch screens were at first introduced for navigation frameworks and were extended to incorporate in-vehicle information systems and presently are being expanded to have connected vehicle information .

Screens in vehicles have been successfully offering information and entertainment using infotainment frameworks (Demers, 2005). Nonetheless, because of the nature of a screen rather than a tangible interaction technique, the touch screen does not offer sufficient haptic feedback to the driver to swiftly track down them by touch and control them without looking. The absence of tactile feedback related with touch screens can negatively affect “mental load and interrup ability.

Figure 1. A rich picture contextualizing the problem space and external influences.

In Figure 1, the internal factors are the boxes within the rectangular blue lines (driver’s registration, admin, and approved drivers) whereas the boxes outside the rectangular blue lines are the external factors (i.e., drivers, non-approved drivers and users). According to the rich picture illustrated in Figure 1, the drivers would register using the driver registration part of the app, then it would be approved by a human from the admin section. Approved drivers will be allowed to go online and accept rides from users, while non-approved drivers will be sent a mail, telling them of the decline and the reason for the decline.

The aim of this work is to understand the driver onboarding process of a ride sharing app, the challenges and possible recommendations using human factor integrations. The specific objectives are tabulated below:

1. Do research by applying relevant methodology,
2. Evaluate human factors integration,
3. Evaluation of usability of the drivers onboarding system,
4. Analyze the situational awareness of the drivers’ onboarding process and see how comfortable they are with it,

System usability scale is a practical and reliable tool for measuring perceived ease of use, and it can be used across a broad range of digital products and services to help UX designers decide if there is an overall problem with a designed system.

A thinking out loud test is done by asking participants to test a system by using it and simply talking out their thoughts as they use the system.

Cognitive walkthroughs are used to examine the usability of a product. They are designed to see whether or not a new user can easily carry out tasks within a given system. It is a task-specific approach to usability (in contrast to heuristic evaluation which is a more holistic usability inspection). The idea is that if given a choice – most users prefer to do things to learn a product rather than to read a manual or follow a set of instructions. 

The author asked users to do a test signup of the drivers’ side on a ride sharing app. This will help to understand the best approach to take, after getting feedback from them.