Context

Parents are busier than ever, balancing work and managing picking their child up from school or dropping them off at soccer practice. VanGo is a rideshare platform built for busy working parents, who can use the app to schedule safe rides for their preteens and teenagers.

VanGo was launched in June 2018 with an MVP mobile app. I joined the team in 2019 to help elevate the app to a seamless and delightful experience for both parents and drivers.

Impact

New rideshare and driver apps were launched on iOS and Android in 4 markets in the US
Apps supported 2000+ rides per week
Power drivers did 50+ rides a week on the driver’s app
Improved acquistion and helped business grow from $150k to $1M in a year in annual GMV

Problems

Based on qualitative and quantitative data, the old app had a few user experience issues that made using the app confusing for new and current users.

❓No onboarding process

The user creates an account and is then dropped off in the settings tab of the app where they are left to fill out their profile without instruction
If they do not fill it out completely, they will receive errors in the app and not be able to use it without clearly knowing why

🏋️ High friction when booking a ride

Users are forced to add locations and payment info before being able to interact with the app, preventing people from exploring before committing
Old designs made it confusing to track a ride, knowing when a ride was accepted, and booking recurring rides

Prototyping and testing

I met with the PM and the founder to sketch out a user flow for the new experience. I then started working on creating rapid prototypes for testing with users.

Iterating #1
Parents want to see the estimated time of arrival, even on rides scheduled for the future

Iterating #2
Parents didn’t know that a card was tappable, and wanted more information on which child was on the ride

Final round of testing results

After interviewing and testing 11 parents:

✨ Improve the first-time experience

100% of users felt that the onboarding experience was easy to use and understand

65% of users felt compelled to continue exploring the app after signing up

🎨 Update the look and feel

90% of users liked the friendly and approachable aesthetic to the redesign

100% of current users felt that that the redesign was an improvement

🚗 Make it easier to book + track rides

67% of users were able to successfully book a ride without needing assistance

100% of users were able to track a ride and liked the details that were trackable

Launch

The newly designed app was slowly rolled out on iOS and eventually Android.

Launched in four metro areas (Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, and suburbs of NYC)
Reduced team's time spent on tech support by 46%
Contributed to decrease in CAC by 5x

Style guide and design system

I update VanGo's existing brand guidelines into a more cohesive design system for engineers to make reusable components out of, which made creating new flows and screens much faster.

VanGo

My role

The team

Timeline