Dryva - Connecting Car Owners with Drivers

Ride-hailing platforms are becoming a necessity in our everyday lives. The ease with which it offers, ordering for a ride from the comfort of your home, and watching it get to your location makes the experience quite fascinating. Dryva, a platform for requesting drivers to chauffeur car owners around, offers a unique service that only people living in Lagos can understand, as driving can be exhausting and mentally tasking.

About the Project 

While existing ride-hailing platforms are serving the market of non-car owners, there also exists a market for individual car owners who prefer being driven around in their cars — as a means of coping with the stressful lifestyle associated with large urban cities, such as traffic congestion, and long commute times.

Most times, people don’t intend to hire a driver for an extended period, they need one for a few days or weeks, and neither do they want to become dependent on ride-hailing services for all their transportation needs. Thus, a platform that provided for this demographic in particular was necessary.

Goals & Objectives

• To help improve a user’s lifestyle by taking away the stress of finding short-term drivers.

• Easy and flexible hiring process.

• Minimal UI designs with easy navigation and fewer user actions.

Team

The design team consisted of myself and Kingsley Omin. We had three weeks to create the designs that would help our users reach this goal. We worked with the Alta Labs Engineering team.

Research Exploration

With a better understanding of the product requirements, we began research explorations. Our target audience is primarily working-class individuals with private cars aged between 28 - 38 years who often engage in activities that require them to commute frequently. After developing a research recruitment plan and scheduling studies with participants. We conducted user interviews.

Here are some relevant questions I asked:

• What is a typical workday like for you?

• How often do you commute?

• How long is your commute?

• What would you like to do while commuting?

• What are some of the issues you experience while driving yourself?

• Would you like to be chauffeured around sometimes?

The research helped us identify the pain points experienced by potential users while driving themselves on their daily commute, and consequently, how best to tackle them.

Wireframing

Following the insights from the research and user interviews, we brainstormed on all the outlined app features, various pages, and actions carried out on those pages. This information enabled us to sketch out a user flow to connect all of the pages. We created wireframes and a low-fidelity prototype for the client and development team to interact with and offer their feedback.

Wireframing at this stage allowed us to figure out page layouts and skeletal structures. This made it easier to minimize user actions and deliver a better experience in the most effective way possible.

Final Solution

The next action plan was to create an extensive style guide and component library to help communicate the brand’s identity and give the product an exciting feel.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, We experimented with design elements similar to existing ride-hailing platforms to help ease navigation around the app and complete tasks with minimal effort. We ended up with two intuitive and highly functional mobile applications:

• A user app that allowed car owners to request certified drivers on the platform registered and vetted by the Dryva team.

• An app for drivers to accept and manage requests from Dryva users.

We delivered the final designs to the developers on schedule. Once we handed off the final design solutions, we were on stand-by for development support while they finished building the applications. During the development process, we were able to catch missed interactions and clarify the flow of pages.

The Dryva apps (user and driver) can be downloaded here and here.

Conclusion and Reflections

Working on this project was a fantastic experience. I got to learn so much about the user-centered design process. Figma was an excellent choice for the project primarily because of its collaborative feature. Similarly, I worked through all design phases, and I’m very excited about the outcome. In my quest for more insights into human behavior and skills to empower me to be a better product designer, this project, in particular, challenged me to rethink my initial ideas and design directions.