Thank You For Sharing: Interaction design of a peer-to-peer car sharing service

Thank You For Sharing: Interaction design of a peer-to-peer car sharing service

Gerritsen, J.G.

Sleeswijk-Visser, F. (mentor)
Beella, S.K. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Communication & Conceptualization

Master of Science Design for Interaction

2013-05-16

MyWheels, a Dutch non-profit organization, provides a hybrid of traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) and peer-to-peer (P2P) car sharing. In the P2P model, private car owners can share their cars with other drivers in the neighbourhood, it has been part of MyWheels service since late 2011. The focus of this project is to contribute to the interaction design of the P2P model, which has to lead to an implementation into the current online platform of MyWheels. The overall aim is to simplify the usability and improve the user experience. The project consists of a discovery phase, followed by redefining the design goal and consequently a development phase in which three iterations have been made to deliver a working online prototype. Several steps were taken in the discovery phase to ensure the relevance of the design. An initial understanding of the sharing economy, of which P2P car sharing forms a part, highlights principles for successful businesses. Building a community and building trust are the most influential principles for this project. A comparison between P2P and B2C car sharing found that the main difference is the introduction of a third party, the private car owner. As a result car sharing has become more social, but also less convenient because private cars are not build for sharing and more communication between users is required. A review of MyWheels current implementation of the service platform shows that it has not made a complete transition to offer convenient P2P car sharing. Similar services from around the world provide examples of improvements. Final insights were found during interviews with pairs of Mywheels drivers and owners that confirm the need of the previous findings and emphasized the high level of personal interaction users have together. The results are mapped on a customer journey map which identifies the weakest links in the car sharing process of MyWheels. The improvement offered in this project aims at increasing MyWheels involvement to let users trust and get to know each other earlier in the process. Also a vision is created for the interaction that is inspired by traditional borrowing: car sharing should become more about sharing experiences and awarding appreciation. The first step of development was setting three goals: Give users an online personality, facilitate online communication between users, and finally capture and communicate experiences. The development has gone through the phases of foundation, form and functionality. In the foundation all features, flow and interaction were designed, in the next phase wireframe sketches were made and tested with the user group and in the final phase actual functionality is created in the backend and frontend of the website. In a final user test most functionality was working in a test environment. The end result is evaluated with a high usability that helps people to get to know and trust each other by the introduction of a rating and review system and motivates people to keep participating actively in the service by the introduction of a gratitude system.

car sharing
service design
online prototype

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:43095167-981a-445b-8fd9-d068894fb18d

2014-05-16

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Gerritsen, J.G.