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It's 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and I'm stuck in back-to-back pau hana (after work) traffic coming home from Honolulu. I glance to my left and right and see each car with only one person inside. Meanwhile, gas prices are high, parking is a struggle, and public transportation isn’t always reliable. I couldn’t help but wonder—why isn’t carpooling more common?
This thought led me to explore a solution. I conducted surveys and interviews to understand the biggest challenges people face with carpooling—trust, convenience, and coordination. Using these insights, I designed an app that connects students and working professionals with reliable carpool buddies based on their locations and routes.
UX Researcher, UX Designer, Graphic Designer
June 10, 2024 - June 14, 2024
Most people are willing to carpool, but have a hard time finding and connecting with classmates or coworkers that share similar commuting routes and schedules.
This issue is especially prevalent in large companies and schools, where it is difficult to manually identify potential matches amongst thousands of individuals.
An app that facilitates convenient carpooling opportunities by helping users efficiently find and connect with nearby classmates or coworkers with similar commuting routes and schedules.
I interviewed 6 participants and surveyed over 50 participants on Oahu that commute to different companies and schools. Through this representative group, I found the main pain points and reasons preventing people from carpooling.
Your carpool options are limited to the tiny portion of people you actually know in your company/school.
Out of the people that are willing to carpool, it is difficult to find someone that lives nearby and leaves at the same times as you.
It takes too much time and effort to manually search for, filter through, and connect with potential carpool matches.
You may feel apprehensive about carpooling with strangers.
For the MVP, I decided to focus on mitigating the top four reasons for why people don't carpool.
After I got a good idea of what my target audience was looking for, I started brainstorming the overall structure of the app and what features to include.
The flow is simple and straightforward – answer basic questions, create an account, view list of your potential carpool matches, and then message your carpool matches.
Click through the prototype or see link here: ShareWheels High-Fidelity Prototype
These features directly target the main reasons people do not to carpool, based on my earlier research.
Through thoughtful user research and problem-solving, ShareWheels was created as a comprehensive approach to addressing carpooling challenges. Here is what I learned along the way and some next steps I would take if I were to continue this project.
I really appreciate the safety features. Seeing user ratings and mutual connections makes me feel a lot more comfortable about carpooling.
This would make my commute so much less stressful. I would definitely use this app and recommend it to all my friends and coworkers!
I was a little worried about carpooling with a stranger, but the profile details make it feel way more trustworthy.
With less than a week to conduct user research and design the high-fidelity prototype for ShareWheels, I learned how to prioritize features and streamline design iterations efficiently. Overcoming these challenges underscored the importance of balancing speed with quality in delivering a user-centered product under time constraints.
