Design for busy parents, from 0 to 2000+ weekly active users

Pogo is an award-winning, Seattle based startup. It’s an iOS & Android app that can help parents to find reliable rides in their trusted communities. Parents can find carpool friend, coordinate carpool, and request professional ride.

Role

prototype | interaction | visual design | web development

Type

Individual work

My Role

I joined Pogo in August 2016 when it launched V1.0. We have 6 people in our team. As a sole UX and Visual designer, I’ve been working on improving end-to-end experience of the product, and boosting active users by building our website and delivering marketing materials.

Research and Insights

I worked with our team to uncover insights by interviewing targeted users, gathering user feedbacks, watching user behavior videos. This helps us to translate our concepts into features that address users behaviors and motivations.

Planning

I partnered with our CEO, who is also project manager to prioritize and negotiate features for upcoming versions. By understanding our business strategies, I worked with the whole team from ideation to implementation.

Design and Validation

I created mocks, frameworks, and prototypes to drive with decision making. I executed flows, mocks, prototypes for usability study, and design specs.

The process: Lean Startup UX

The design process our team is using is lean UX, which helped our team to move fast and learn fast.

Understanding Pogo

Help busy parents to find trusted and reliable rides for their kids, and help people to coordinate carpool for their kids

Our goal is not just being a service provider. We want to create an ecosystem for users. The following diagram explains our 3 key elements, which is discovery, reliable, utility, and what our competitors are doing:

Understanding users needs

Based on my research, there are 2 types of families we should take care of. I created the following diagram to help our team understand who are those people and where are they at.

After 12 interviews and market research, we shifted our business strategy from only focusing on carpool families to both families. To define our potential users who involved in this ride-sharing system, I created these 3 personas:

To explain how we connect these people to make this system work, I created the following diagram to help our team understand the relationships.

Previous design

The previous design was created by an agency. It is visually pleasing and provides a good infrastructure to redesign. By conducting user research and learning from feedbacks, I found there were a couple of problems from business, product, and user experience perspectives.

Business:

Not an effective business model. Only focus on utility and solving the problem for less than 10% people.

Product:

Doesn’t address the problem that 90% people have: they don’t have a carpool friend
Doesn’t build the connections among features. Features become meaningless when people don’t understand them

User experience:

Confusing and complicated (I pointed details in the following picture.)
Doesn’t provide an effective architecture for people to understand this new carpool concept
Simply stack information in mobile device without considering time and space interaction

Challenges

Building a new business model is challenging. There are a couple of design challenges I’m facing:

How can I get people use Pogo?
How can I make people keep using it?
How can I create a trusted and reliable product for parents?

Problem 1. People don’t know where to find trusted and reliable rides.

Improve core flow

V1 to V1.X : Improve core flow

Iterations based on previous design

From V 1 to V1.X, I iterated the product based on the previous design.But if the product doesn’t allow people find carpool friend, it won’t work anyway.

Version 2 & 3

Discover people who go to the same place

Improvements:

Introduce posts and recommend matches with more concrete details about routes
Clarify 3 needs: looking for share rides, drive and take extra kids, need a driver

Impacts:

More helpful for people to discover carpool friends

Version 2

Version 3

Problem 2. Lack of data & lack of users

Building a new trusted community, density is very important for this new product. If there is no effective route in this community, then nobody will find a carpool. At first, 90% users got empty search result.

Solution:

Create a better FTUE to increase the density & optimize acquisition funnel

Before

After

Version 1

An easy and intuitive way to drive other kids

Problems:

People said they were willing to drive other kids but only 400 routes entered to show intend of driving other kids.
90% of users will get empty results in the beginning. (Challenge 1, Version 2)

Improvements:

Create an easy and educational FTUE flow to gather location information

Impacts:

84% of 5k+ new users gave us their location information in FTUE flow
Only a few people got empty search result