Re-defining Bounce Operations App
Bounce is a 2 wheeler ride-sharing app that allows users to pick up & drop scooters anywhere. These are keyless scooters that function on Bluetooth and can be unlocked using your mobile phones.
Bounce Operations App: This app facilitates our operations team to assemble, clean, maintain & service our scooters on-ground. These executives rely on this app to make a living.
Bengaluru’s Bounce becomes world’s fastest-growing bike-sharing start-up July 31, 2019 | Business Standard
Why Redefine?
To reach 100k rides/day and with our fleet size growing three times larger, efficiency within the Ops team had to be improved.
This meant keeping more active scooters on the street to help support demand.
It was also getting challenging to keep track of agents performance. The current process was not scaling well to new business & team use cases.
Research
In order to get a thorough understanding of our executives, we started having one on ones with them. I soon realised that simply talking to them wouldn’t give us all the relevant insights. So I planned to conduct different types of research to help us get unbiased feedback. These researches were conducted along with product, business & engineering to ensure they too understand and empathise with our executives.
One on One Interview: We met about 41 executives on the ground performing tasks.
Shadowing: We shadowed about 10 executives while they were performing their tasks.
Group Discussion: We called about 30 executives to our office & had an open chat/discussion about the problems they face.
Executives for the day: We ourselves were the executives for an entire day performing tasks.
Competitive Study: We spend some time with Swiggy Delivery agents & Uber Driver-partners to understand common problems faced by them.
Designing for our on-ground executives meant designing on the field & not from comfort of our desks.
Mapping down our understanding of the current flow
With a tight deadline of 6weeks & a team of 2, I had to plan out the next steps meticulously. One thing was very clear to me — this product can not be built in isolation inside the four walls of our office. We spend the 1st few days meeting product managers, business & engineering team trying to get their understanding of the current processes in place. We then met with the Cluster Heads to get a reality check on the process currently being followed. A Cluster Head manages a cluster within the city and usually has a team of 10 -15 on-ground executives reporting to them.
Existing Teams & Processes
We have different teams handling different scooter related issues.
About 3k executives within Bangalore were interacting via 4 different apps daily in order to complete one single task.
WhatsApp/Google Sheets: To mark their attendance and Whatsapp to reach out to their managers in case of any issues.
3rd Party App: An onfield workforce manager app where our executives would perform the tasks assigned to them.
Ops App: An internal tool, where the scooters OTP would be provided. The executives would also use this app to check the latest location of the scooter.
Google Maps: For navigation towards the task.
Top Insights
Challenge in driving: Difficulty in holding a phone while driving. Driving with more than two helmets is a challenge. Quite a few of them had broken phones.
Missing transparency: They do not get to know about how much money they are earning per task, and if the serviced scooters took any ride.
Communication: Use emojis to communicate with TL’s & other agents on WhatsApp. Agents are more comfortable reading in English than in Kannada.
Aware & competitive: They always know their colleagues are up to & how many tasks they have completed.
Washroom breaks: Breaks are limited as finding public washrooms are difficult due to which they don’t drink enough water. No space to carry water.
Safety: Difficulty performing tasks during harsh sunlight, rain & at night. New agents did not have an ID card which caused issues while performing tasks.
Guiding principles based on insights
Based on the research conducted, we created personas which helped us understand our executives better. Based on this persona, we designed a few guidelines which would be the building blocks for our entire app.
Respect & Encourage: The executives should be valued for the work that they are doing.
Easy & Consistent Interactions: The learning curve should be minimum. The app should build on what they have already learnt. Please don’t make me think.
Be forgiving: The app should accommodate for mistakes. It should reduce anxiety by providing feedback on every action they take.
Simple & Kind tone of voice: It should encourage & motivate them to do more.
Language agnostic: More visuals, fewer words
Reward, Empower & Retain: Use rewards & recognition to keep them motivated.
Build an app that allows our Agents to service bounce scooters
so that they are able to perform tasks as quickly & efficiently as possible by providing them with all the tools & resources required to perform a task successfully.
Flow Chart
Before going into the wireframe stage, we worked with product, business & engineering team to map out the roadmap for Bounce Hero. We broke down all the requirements and the approaches to prioritise what we wanted to build in the first version. We decided to put all our efforts into solving for one team - the inspection team, as this team was critical in making more scooters active. For Phase 1, We decided to focus on core functionalities which allow our agents to perform tasks faster & with more efficiency to help achieve the 100k/day rides goal.
Wireframes
Once we had clarity on what we are going to build, I worked with my team & the product team to create a flow for the app. We noted down everything that we thought would be required for an executive to complete a task. Based on the discussions we had with the executives, we set priorities within these.
This exercise helped us simplify the flow & build a hierarchy in design within the app. It also helped us eliminate a lot of data points. Once we had sketched out the high-level flow, we broke it down & worked on it piece by piece after which we moved on to creating wireframes.
Final Design
After speaking to over 60 executives, we realised that for the executives to do a good job, we constantly need to respect them, talk to them & keep encouraging them. It started with renaming our app from ‘Ops App’ to ‘Bounce Hero’. The name became an instant hit amongst our executives whom we now call heroes.
We tested different colours for the app at different times of the day on low-end mobile phones. The dark background with the white card stood out as a clear winner due to its contrast. Text & actions were visible even with high reflection.
Onboarding:
After logging in from their registered mobile number, our Bounce heroes are taken to a screen where we thank them for helping millions of our users and we welcome them to the Bounce family. Throughout the app, we call our Bounce Heroes by their name. This helps build a relationship with them.
Task Flow V1: Scooters with Keypad
The initial task flow was designed to keep our older versions of scooters in mind.
Task Flow V2: Scooters with Bluetooth
On testing with our Heroes, we observed that they were spending more time looking for the scooter. This would impact their task turn around time (TAT).
With Bluetooth, we have more control over the scooter’s location. These scooters come with a ringer so it’s easy to locate them. As soon as the scooter connects with the phone, it vibrates to let them know that the scooter is connected & is very close to them.
Task Input:
Once they find the scooter, the app guides them through all the tasks that need to be performed on the scooter. These questions are completely configurable.
When we tested these design with our heroes, they could not relate to the lock & info icons shown on top. Based on this feedback, we made a few changes in design. The top section is now dedicated to quick links & task summary as shown below.
Impact
With this redesign, the efficiency of the tasks performed by our Bounce Heroes improved significantly. They no longer have to switch between multiple apps to perform one single task.
Task performed per agent increased by 92%
TAT (Turn around time) per task reduced by 54%
Task to ride ratio reduced by 30%
Active Scooter went up by 25%
Cost per task reduced by 53%
This helped achieve our goal of 100k rides/day.
Metrics we have started tracking: Happiness score & NPS to help reduce Attrition Rate.
This design will now scale to other teams like movement & hubs.
Learnings
Building Empathy: It’s all about developing empathy with our users. Prototyping & testing the product with actual Bounce heroes in real-world context helped us identify the challenges they were facing while using the product.
Empathy for our users is essential but at times, it is also important to step back and look at the problem objectively.
Involving the product, business & engineering team in this process helped us all to remain on the same page. It helped build empathy within the entire organisation.
Teamwork & collaboration: Constant follow-ups with all stakeholders helped us all to be on the same page. It also gives everyone visibility into the design process. Design Principles helped create a common language for the team.
Feedback: Frequent testing of designs & feedback sessions helps overcome cognitive biases. There is always room for improvement. The sooner we get feedback, the faster we are able to iterate.
Documentation: We missed out on clicking pictures for the various research activities & group discussions that were conducted over time. This would have helped us in better documentation. Documentation helps communicate the design itself, design reasonings and learnings.
Thanks to the entire design, product, engineering & business teams at Bounce but most importantly to our Bounce Heroes for helping us build this amazing product.
Designers involved in this project: Barath venkatesan, Nirvan Byotra & Abhishek Sethia (Intern)
