Lyft is a leader in the rideshare industry and their design and user experience is excellent. As a user, I decided to suggest some potential improvements for their app experience.
Not Just Car Rides
If you’ve used the Lyft app before you’ll realize that they have been positioning their app as a hub for not just car rideshare but also offering Bike Share (in NYC) and public bus transit as well.
The bike share feature offers bicycles from Citibike which is prevalent in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, Queens and NJ that are in close proximity of Manhattan.
The detailed level map shows where each bike station is. The marker is a bubble with an indicator of red and green and includes a lightning bolt icon to indicate e-bike availability. That is 3 key pieces of information provided.
The red dot indicates a station with only 1 or 2 bikes left. 3 or more is indicated with a green dot. The map detail does well enough to give the user information on where the best stations to find a Citibike however I found myself tapping into each one to see exactly how many bikes are left. During rush hour 3 bikes might not be very many bicycles and may be a risky endeavor to go there and find no bicycles left. And important piece of info is missing in the markers: size of the station. Is there a way to show station size in a marker?
Currently, the largest part of the marker is used by the bicycle icon. Every marker has the bicycle icon but it doesn’t give us any new information.
I quickly mocked up an idea in Framer to create a new marker prototype that keeps the same information as provided in the current markers and adds size and offers a higher precision of availability.
The first thing we can get rid of is the bike icon. It doesn’t add any information and takes up the most space.
For size of each station I could have literally increased the size of the marker in indicate size but I noticed the size differences for each station could’ve been vast. I saw some stations with only 4 slots and others with 40 slots. I imagined that having a proportional marker size would’ve quickly become very cluttered.
I decided to try creating an outer ring for each marker and split them up so each bike would be represented by a cell. I feel like this would be a clean way to give a sense of quantity at each station and by coloring in the cells, we can display the exact number of bikes available. I think this surely would save users a number of taps and to have to drill into markers to see number of bikes available.
My design retains the green/red indicator and lightning bolt icon for e-bikes.
Oh No, Not Another Tutorial
Another part of the app that I felt could use an update and an improvement in efficiency is the Bike Share interstitial walkthrough that Lyft displays the first time you use Bike Share.
Do users like forced app walkthroughs? Lyft will display a walkthrough for how to use Citibike that the user must swipe through.
My first issue with the walkthrough is that it uses clipart. While they are certainly nice-looking, it abstracts some important basic information that the user would want to know: what and where the QR code would be at the station, how to put the bike back in the dock and what the lock activation light looks like in real life.
In a world of TikTok, I think video snippets of the same information would do a much better job of conveying the same ideas and would be more digestible while giving richer information faster.
I created this sample snippet in the style of a quick TikTok video. I believe this snippet would get more engagement with users while doing a better job of getting the message across. There will be less swiping, less reading, less thinking, and less guessing on the part of the users.
I have a few other suggestions and even found a major bug in the app but these suggestions that I proposed would be the most effectual.
Let me know what you think of these suggestions for Lyft. You can find me on Twitter @johnla and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnnyla/.
