Meta Refresh 2018

Uber, currently in 600+ cities across the world is one of the fastest growing companies. As we grew, we realized a major portion of our rides was coming from the emerging markets. However, presence of low-end devices, connectivity issues and majorly usability constraints were acting as barriers to this growth. 75% of our sessions were coming from 2014 or older year-class devices and 33% sessions were happening on sub-3G networks. We were not giving an optimized experience to a majority of our users.

How did we enable our unaddressed segment of riders to use our platform for the first time. “Anyone can Uber” became our mission.

We started off by breaking tech barriers, but in our research, we discovered our users’ complexity of understanding certain constructs like maps, addresses, pickups etc. which were becoming a barrier for them. We started striving for a simpler user experience, we learned from local constructs like landmark based pickups and designed an experience which gives confidence to our new user base. We took some hard calls like doing away with maps. Wow, can you imagine Uber without maps? We designed in close collaboration with our users to build a product that was naturally inclusive.

Outline

In this talk, we will present our journey of designing a truly accessible product. We will share our playbook to approaching design for the emerging markets and the new set of users who are experiencing internet for the first time.

We plan to do this as a unique orchestration between Design and Research. The format we will use is a two-person hand-over presentation where design (Anurag) and research (Naman) bring their unique perspectives to breakdown the process of inclusive design.

Speaker bio

I work with the Product design team at Uber, based in Bangalore. I am focussed on designing for the emerging markets like Brazil, Mexico, India and SEA. I have been with Uber for more than a year and a half working on Uber Lite, m.uber and UPI. Prior to Uber I worked for Twitter where I worked on Twitter Lite and Microsoft where I worked on designing gestures for their iPad products. Having worked on emerging markets for the last 2 years, I sensitize with the problems and bring a unique perspective to the solutions which are real, usable and inclusive.

Links

• www.anuragarora.in
• www.twitter.com/anuragarora_
• https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/12/17450282/uber-lite-app-emerging-market-india
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpMjLarfWPo