Ridesharing reduces the number of cars on the road and as well as traffic and pollution. However, failed projects and initiatives revealed a reluctance towards ridesharing within the Swedish population as well as a lack of successful business cases related to these initiatives.
Solution
To overcome these cultural and economic challenges, we propose a ridesharing service - Carla.
Carla is designed for Swedish commuters and purchasable as a complete service by companies for their employees. The service contains a mobile application that lets the user add their own commute trips or search for trips to join, in order to find colleagues to share rides with. All administrative activities related to ride-sharing are now centered to one app.
Process
Using user-centered design thinking, our cross-functional team designed, developed and validated the service containing a functional prototype for a mobile app. Our design is based on user studies, focusing on the demands of everyday commuters. The design concept was implemented in React Native, resulting in a presentable mobile phone app.
Conclusion
We showed that a ridesharing solution based on an intuitive mobile phone app and a business case built on selling the product to companies as a service is a viable approach to animating the Swedish population to rideshare.
