How Uber quietly redesigned its interface for the rest of the world

Uber Lite seems designed to directly combat some of the problems that Uber has faced internationally by making the experience of booking a car easier for riders. By actually talking to its users, the company realized that in Android-dominated countries, which tend to be non-Western, many phones were not designed to run an app as large as Uber’s. In many of these places, internet networks and GPS aren’t as reliable.

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“When she opened the app she had to figure out where she was—entering pickup location and expecting GPS to resolve it was not optimal,

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As a result, Jalasutram decided to ditch the map completely and start by asking about current location instead of relying on a GPS to determine it.

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Instead of using the map to indicate the status of someone’s ride, the team decided to use bright, bold colors with high contrast ratios and larger text sizes that would make it easier to read in harsh daylight on lower quality screens

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The team realized that many of these users weren’t accustomed to swiping horizontally, and didn’t realize that there were more types of rides they could take.

As a result, the Uber Lite app lists all of the ride options in a vertical format, from least expensive to most expensive. The change was so significant that the design team decided to bring it over to the core Uber app as well, which started rolling out in November 2018.

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Another goal in redesigning the app was purely technical: to strip down the app so that it would only take up five megabytes of space (compared to the 40 megabytes of the U.S. app).

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Some design elements didn’t make the cut, like the font, which Andhare says cost about 200 kilobytes.

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The process of building Lite was an exercise in abandoning assumptions about how people use technology and asking them directly.

Talk to your users.

Posted on August 9, 2019