Share Now’s initial sole offering of minute-based rentals had mainly one use case: short rentals from A to B within the city limits (e.g. commuting). To expand on those use cases, rates for hourly and daily trips were introduced. The initial adoption of these rates was unsatisfying, so, knowing from research that the use case existed, we decided to invest in making them more discoverable.

2019 - 2 Month

◇ The Goals

◇ Starting Point

With the initial design, there was little adoption of non-minute-based rates. There were several issues with the current design that we identified via both user interviews and heuristic evaluations.

• Lots of noise around the main task Users are presented with rate options on the bottom half of the screen.
• Lack of information about the offered rates Late fees and additional km costs are not configurable for individual rates. The user is expected to read the footnote (hidden on smaller screens)
• Lack of flexibility in content visible The cards are not flexible in terms of size and components shown. This makes it difficult for special offers (e.g. Special Easter Rate 🐣) to be presented in the app.
• Carousel Only a few options are visible at a glance making comparisons difficult. This form of display is also not very suitable for large amounts of content (35 or more rate option)

◇ Experimenting

With the business goal of selling more hourly and daily rates, we decided to start an experiment by setting up an A/B Test.

◇ Round 1

For the first experiment, we opted for a simple layout change from horizontally paging cards to vertically scrolling options. This increased the number of rates visible at page load while supporting a more natural scrolling behavior.

We defined the card height as flexible to allow for a more scalable design accommodating potential content additions.

Testing in the wild

We wanted to test a couple of assumptions:

1. Users are unaware of the fact that our service offers anything but minute-based rentals
2. The fact that there is a choice of rate on this screen is overlooked

To validate our assumptions, we ran an A/B test between the original layout with the carousel and the new design. We deliberately decided against user testing first as there is plenty of research available around the UI choices we made and qualitative data would have had little impact.

Learnings

After 2 weeks of full rollout of the latest release with all the changes above, the results were in. The small changes were a big success on both platforms. iOS users opted for hourly and daily rates (non-minute rentals) 8,4% more than before, Android users even 12.,1%.

◇ Round 2

To further improve the screen’s performance, we ran a quick round of user testing to learn what (if anything) was still distracting users from making a choice. Based on the result, we mainly cleaned up the screen’s elements not directly involved with the rate selection.

Relocate the entry to change the payment profile closer to the price to be paid.

Remove damage reporting entry point as most users are not in front of the car when deciding rates

Create illustrations for more visual support of generic use cases for certain trip lengths.

Learnings

The increase in rates sold was not as overwhelmingly positive as in the first A/B test. We stuck to this version nonetheless based on some winning synergies we were able to create with other aspects of the app. The uptick was still around 1% 💪

◇ Next steps

With a shift in focus based on the OKRs, upselling our spontaneous trips with insurance and other extras opened up the opportunity to work more on this topic. See Part II here:

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