Introducing Ola Language Preferences
BACKGROUND
Let me give some background about Ola if you’re not from India. Ola is an online cab aggregator which serves 2 million rides every day(Yup! roughly 23 rides every second) with 8 Lakh vehicles across 110 cities in 22 states of India. You can read more about Ola here.
GOAL
The goals of this project are to
- Improve the User Experience
- Increase Customer Retention
- Attract new Customers
SCOPE
I’ve limited the scope of the project to focus on one segment of users i.e. Riders who are not the nativists of the state they are commuting through Ola. This is a kind of ethnographic study. The reason behind segmentation is that being a country with 29 states and 7 Union Territories, most of the states have their own major spoken language. And we already know that Ola is operational in 22 states. Adding to the fact is that people are residing away from their native state for work in Industrial and IT hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Cochin, Pune and Gurgaon.
THE PROCESS
RESEARCH — Problem Discovery
The main motive of the Interview is to not carried away with my own assumptions and to build the product based on Customer needs and User Centered design.
1. Interviews:
Why I went with Interviews rather than surveys and feedbacks?
I focused on gathering qualitative data rather than quantitative. It helped in finding some untold problems faced by the users which are not possible with close-ended surveys. And also surveys are not detail-oriented since it should be simple and short without eating much of the user’s time. On the other hand, Interview helped in understanding the users better with detailed insights.
The Interviews were more of conversational rather than formal interviews. The outcome of the interviews was deep. The users came up with concerns about emotional factors, pricing, Competitive likes, etc.
2. Naturalistic Observations:
The second set of research activities includes observation of the app being used by users in their natural environment. Doing this kind of activities were a bit difficult for this project. Since Ola has an option called Ola Share (Social ride-sharing by car-pooling service), I had the opportunity to observe the way my co-passengers use the app. The results of the observations were as follows:
- Users are finding difficulties in accessing the rides booked inside the app.
- Non-Nativists ask a friend/neighbour who knows local language to call/speak with the driver for ETA and locations after booking. If no-one is nearby, they themselves have to call the driver. In this case, the first question they asked was, “Do you speak so-and-so language?”. If the driver knows the language of the user, It’s well and good. Otherwise, It becomes hard. Sometimes It even ends up in emotional stress for both riders and drivers like verbal fights.
- Sometimes, Driver asks on-boarded Passenger to speak to another co-passenger for communication purposes (in Ola Share).
3. Contextual Inquiries:
The difference here is that I interacted with the users after the observation I’ve done in Naturalistic Observation. The results were seconding the observations from Naturalistic Observation.
FINDINGS — Problem Definition
I created some User Personas to jot down the demographics, motives, behaviours, pain-points of the users that I interviewed. From the Personas and other research methods, discovered the following problems:
- Users and Drivers are facing communication problem to interact with each other due to a difference in languages.
- Cluttered UI Compared to Uber’s simple UI. The app is usable but not effective.
- Pricing doesn’t make sense.
Ex: At times, The price of Ola Share(Pool category) is around 90% of the price of Ola Micro(Hatchback category).
IDEATION — Brainstorming Ideas
Based on the research discovery and problem findings, Brainstormed some ideas to work on. Some of them are:
App Redesign -On examining the Uber’s app, the process of booking is clean and simple focusing on one task at a time. But it’s not the case with Ola. There is a scope for a redesign of the entire app with respect to User Experience.
Pricing Strategy -I didn’t have enough data to work on the pricing strategy. Ola’s pricing strategy might be with respect to market fit. So a Big No to this idea.
Language Preferences -Another Idea is to introduce language preferences within the app (For both rider facing app and driver facing app). In the current user journey of cab booking process, there is a gap in the product. It fulfils the user needs till booking. After that, It directly goes to tracking the Driver vehicle/Pick-up point and the OTP part. It missed the major part of the booking process, the verbal communication between the driver and the rider i.e. the phone calls that drivers and riders make between them.
PRIORITIZATION
Since we were ready with some ideas, We had to prioritize on the ideas to implement. I followed the Value Vs Complexity Model to arrive at priorities of ideas to work on.
App Redesign -Redesigning the entire app from scratch will be a tedious process. Even though the business value is high, need to think twice before going ahead with this idea. The major impact is the need for the portion of users who were satisfied with the old app experience to learn the new flows completely.
Language Preferences -This is a new feature which we are going to add to the existing app. The complexity/effort will be low as compared with the other idea.
If there was a clash of two or more ideas within the same quadrants, I would have gone with other methodologies such as weighted scoring or opportunity scoring to prioritize on ideas. But now, in this case, we were clear on which way to go ahead.
Even though we had prioritized the ideas, Still there was a need to figure out how the idea fits the market and the difference it brings to our product as compared with competitors (Uber in this case). So we looked at quantitative data that were available and Competitive Analysis to find out the difference it brings to our product compared to Uber.
Data Quants:
We needed data to support the decision to move ahead with building the Language Preferences feature. Here, Data insights like the number of calls made for the purpose of cab booking will help. Fortunately, we were able to get the required data to support the idea.
Here are some of the data we got from TrueCaller about the call insights made for cab booking purpose.
- 2.5 billion calls made for cab booking purpose in 100 days.
- Ola contributed to 103 million calls whereas Uber amounted to 39 million calls.
It would have been a value-add if we had:
- Stats about the Ola userbase with respect to demographics such as nativity, language and the current state of residence to arrive at the priority of languages to include in the feature.
- Stats about the Ola driver partners with respect to the same factors mentioned above.
- The number of customer tickets Ola received with respect to language issues.
- The number of customers using Ola Select(a premium service) to decide on whether to include the Language Preferences feature only for premium users(helps to attract new customers with this feature) or for all(helps in retention of existing customers and to attract international visitors who predominantly uses Uber).
Competitive Analysis:
The major competition for Ola is by the international player Uber. Even though the rides served by Uber in India is less as compared with Ola, Ola can attract the Uber users with this new feature. And most of the International visitors who come to India use Uber for its popularity worldwide. This new feature of choosing the preferred language will provide an option for the foreigner to choose English as a preferred language and hence will add value in attracting international customers as well. So this feature is surely a market differentiator. Overall, It is a killer value-add for the users.
Strategic Fit with Company’s Vision:
Adding a new feature to the product will add no value if it is not aligned with the company’s vision. The feature should travel in the same direction as the company’s vision.
The proposed feature is in lines with the company’s vision to provide hassle-free, reliable and technology-efficient car rental service.
MVP with Rapid Prototyping
After doing all the analysis, we have finally reached the design part of our feature. The design has to be included in both the customer-facing app and driver facing app. Here are the screenshots of the newly designed mock-ups for the customer-facing app.
Mock-ups doesn’t portray the actual functionality of the feature. As I was done with the mock-ups, proceeded with the integration of the newly designed screens into the existing app.
Here’s the Google drive link to play the designed Interactive Prototype GIF if you are not able to play it in Medium — Prototype of Ola Language Preference
Since I didn’t have the exact stats of the userbase and languages spoken, Created an MVP with 6 languages. The higher the languages you select, the higher the probability of getting a driver in the preferred language. Selecting the language doesn’t guarantee the user to get the drivers with the preferred language. It is subjected to availability and locality. And also if the ETA of the cab with preferred language seems to exceed 20 minutes, then the preference will be given to the nearest driver instead of the language. Hence we have added a disclaimer on the preference page to inform the user about it.
Once you book the cab, now the new booking details screen will have an extra label besides OTP to signify the driver’s language. It was designed on the basis of cognitive psychology.
We’ve reached the end of the project. With this, We’ve identified the problems by research, validated the problems and built a Rapid Prototype of MVP for the proposed feature. Will cover more on the launch, market strategy and success metrics to measure in future stories.
Wrapping it up — The Learnings!
Like a cab driver should speak the language of the customer, The Product Manager should speak the language of various stakeholders such as Customers, UX designers, developers and mainly business acumen. This project has largely helped me in learning Customer needs, User-centered design, Rapid Prototyping using Marvel and Business values.
If you’ve made it up to here, Thanks for reading my ideas on adding a new feature to the Ola app. Hope you enjoyed it.
Connect with me on LinkedIn. If you’ve liked the story, Please share and give a clap or two.
Note: The above project is based on my personal interest in building products and product management. It is not affiliated with Ola or any other companies in any way.
