Headquartered in San Francisco, Chariot was a Ford owned commuter shuttle service operating in major metropolitan areas across U.S. until 2019.

Context

As a commuter shuttle service, Chariot looked to fill the gap between a shared Uber or Lyft ride and public transit.

Initially Chariot ran fixed shuttle routes. In 2018 the company decided to experiment with a dynamically generated route for the shuttle, based on current ridership demand.

Problem

How might we best help Chariot scale its service, optimize routes to/from home/work for riders, while capturing real-time ridership demand?

How might we improve the booking and riding experience for frequent, everyday riders?

Goals

1) Redesign the app experience to allow riders to book rides based on start/end destinations vs. selecting a stop on an existing route.

2) Improve experience gaps identified by UXR (ride info, wayfinding, onboarding) and introduce new features such as quick booking.

Hand sketches explorations

My role

As one of the product designers on this project, I…

Collaborated closely with the head of product, a product manager and another product designer on goals and milestones for the project, design iterations and output.
Designed the core riding experience, quick booking, enterprise and sign up/new user eduction flows, from basic concepts, through iterations and final designs (UX, UI, interaction)
When my design colleague left the team, I became responsible for iterating on and finalizing the core booking flow until new product designers joined our team.
Collaborated with a UX researcher on research plan, ran UXR sessions myself at times and joined research field trips and interviews.
Documented final designs for engineering, creating high-fidelity prototypes for demos and participated actively in QA sessions and eng demos.

Discovery Phase

Persona profiles

Expert interviews

Legacy experience pain points

Design Process: Iterations

UXR Concept Testing

I joined our researcher on ride alongs and testing sessions to help collect feedback during the design process.

“I’m not really sure what that icon means. No idea.”
– New rider, San Francisco
“I really like the picture of where I’ll get picked up at. This is great.”
– Frequent rider, NYC

Takeaways: