VRide- A Carpooling Application

Brief: To research the need and design a carpool application to benefit the employees at Veritas.

Process:

Carpooling:

An arrangement where two or more people share the use and cost of privately

Owned automobiles in traveling to and fro pre-arranged destination together.

Initial stages involved checking out various carpool sites to clearly understand the concept and what do the sites comprise of.

Then studying the existing commuting system of employees and the transportation facility of Veritas. Interviews, talks and discussions followed to understand the user's concept of a carpool, how they think the idea would benefit them, current difficulties faced while traveling, work schedules especially of some women and advantages of carpooling over public transport, level of social interaction among the employees, commuting allowances paid by the company, cab facility, etc.

Findings from user study:

1. People wanted to avoid traffic congestion.
2. Save the commuting expenses
3. Women preferred traveling through private transport.
4. Flexible timings of the company required people to travel late at night.
5. Less interdepartmental interaction
6. Scheduling car pool would be a time consuming task for them.
7. People ended up spending more than allotted traveling allowance.

Business benefit would be money, time, health and security of employees. Hence the company could save on its traveling expenses and allocate that money in motivational schemes to increase carpooling among its employees like celebrate carpooler's day, give parking privileges to carpoolers, etc.

Features decided:

•  customized carpool service- member login

•  carpool for regular, on-the-fly and school commuting for all

•  search for a ride – time, location, weekly schedule, etc.

•  pool listings with schedules, time, route taken, preferences, availability of seats, add group to mypool, e-mail pool.

•  Form a pool, add/delete/edit member information to mypool, set preferences,

•  PoolBook to manage information on all my current pools, its members, and favorite pools, recently traveled pools.

•  Announcement Box for on-the-fly pools.

•  Member profile for others to read

Further considerations:

•  Extend communication to mobile phone/pda/pagers.

•  Extend the site to the Internet

•  Others

We did task flows and information architecture for the same and finally built hi-fi prototypes.