How open source collaboration & designing from data improves urban mobility

Every minute of every day, consumers and partners on the Uber platform can tap a button and get a ride, get a meal or get work. That’s why we’re so committed to understanding how cities work.

Cities are complex, constantly evolving organisms. Making sense of those changes is imperative to our meeting the needs of the communities we serve.

That’s why we open source data tools to support the growth of an ecosystem that people can use to create safer standards, a cleaner environment, and greater efficiency in cities around the globe. To make this vision a reality, we open source data tools to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Data bridges the digital and physical worlds

Design at Uber is unique because our users’ experiences within the app must align seamlessly with those in the physical world.

Visualizing data helps us bridge between worlds. We translate real-world data into virtual representations to help us study, shape, and transform. In turn, we bring those virtual representations back into physical space through the way we move around cities.

Laying a foundation

A few years ago, we realized we needed to create a wide array of tools to help us learn from the massive amounts of data we generate:

• In 2015, we created the Data Visualization Team to build useful tools for data visualization and analysis. Data visualization is one important way we translate raw data noise into beautiful, useful design solutions.
• In 2016, we created a design system for crafting better (more beautiful) data maps.
• In 2017, we launched Uber Movement, a tool that uses our data to help urban planners make informed decisions about our cities.
• That same year, our team partnered with Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group to create a web-based platform to better leverage the sensor-captured data from self-driving cars.
• Now, we are open sourcing the Autonomous Visualization System (AVS), a powerful new way to understand, explore, and share autonomous data. Critically, we want AVS to serve as an important tool to help guide the continued improvement of our global civil infrastructure.

Joining forces

We are constantly looking for opportunities to work with partners dedicated to the same goal. That’s why we are excited to join the Urban Computing Foundation (UFC), a new organization led by Linux and counting Facebook, Google, HERE Technologies, Interline Technologies, Senseable City Labs, and StreetCred Labs. The UCF works to accelerate the open development of software to improve urban mobility, transportation, safety, and infrastructure.

We are honored that the first project to be hosted by the UCF is Kepler.gl, an open source geospatial tool we built and launched in 2018 to help make it easier to create meaningful visualizations of location data without the need for coding. Kepler.gl is used by developers, data scientists, visualization specialists, and engineers around the world to explore and analyze a variety of scenarios that include transportation patterns and safety trends. Some of the companies already using Kepler.gl include Airbnb, Atkins Global, Cityswifter, HERE Technologies, Limebike, Mapbox, Sidewalk Labs, and Uber.

By helping to found and contribute to the Urban Computing Foundation, we’re continuing our efforts to help lead the way toward smarter, human-centered cities. We are excited about this collaboration and look forward to learning and building together.

Want to learn more? Read about Uber’s partnership with the Urban Computing Foundation and donation of Kepler.gl on the Uber Engineering Blog, check out Uber Movement, and try out the rest of our visualization suite.

Learning from cities was originally published in Uber Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now we’ve reached the point where we’re not just 20 designers sitting together in a single pod of desks in one building, on one floor. We’re a design team of 150 people strong, stretched down Market Street in San Francisco; embedded in city teams in Chicago, DC, London, and Cape Town; and plugging away at product in LA and Amsterdam (and hopefully New York soon — we’re hiring!).

In order to grow as a single, unified design team, we’re exploring ways to connect that are meaningful, don’t require a huge commitment of time, and that are a step above sharing funny GIFs in Slack (although we can’t discredit Oprah and her bees).

One of our first forays into a cross-team project was tackling Elle Luna and the Great Discontent’s 100 Days Project. Twenty designers across different design teams at Uber wanted to imagine what we could produce with a small bit of time every day. We each chose our own theme and medium and — as the name of the project indicates — worked at it for 100 days to see what we could accomplish. We shared an Instagram account, a few hashtags, and lots of stress over how hard it is to dedicate yourself to making something every day. Did we all finish? Definitely not. But we all learned quite a bit about ourselves and our coworkers along the way. Six designers decided to share their biggest takeaways:

Process is the Perfect Space

Victoria Stanell, #100DaysofSpace

What I learned from being a part of the 100 Days Project community is that I had a creative point of view about something I’ve always cared deeply about, but never really expressed outside my head. I’ve always loved astronomy and meditating about our place and purpose in life, and this was my first time showing that to the rest of the world.

When I first started this project, I put pressure on myself to package every piece within the bounds of a perfectly contained “universe” (as a writer, it’s dangerously easy to fall into the trap of perfectionism). But as ideas and inspiration kept flowing and diverging into unexpected paths, I found it easier to let go of the system and enjoy seeing where every day’s curiosity would lead me.

On days when I posted something that “stretched the theme” or “wasn’t up to the collection’s standard,” I had to remind myself that there were infinite possibilities to explore — and I could paint any of them the next day.

Starting With a System

Mason Field, #100LineDesigns

Starting has never come easy for me — don’t ask my team how long I waited before stepping foot in the gym across the street. I’ve attempted a couple 100/365 day challenges and almost every day I’d face the same dilemma of not knowing what to draw, or what to photograph. The difference this time around and the reason I was able to finish was because of a simple system I laid out before day one began. I eliminated variability by starting with black, 1 point stroke illustrations in a 100 point square. These parameters allowed plenty of flexibility when choosing objects, but eliminated indecision when sitting down to execute them.

As the first week passed, then the first month, I wanted to expand the system — you can see a huge difference in the first 50 and last 50 designs. The greatest part for me was that the difference came from introducing color and fill, there wasn’t a need to rethink the concept! If you start with a working system, introducing new elements can spark ideas and allow a completely new look to evolve.

Turning an Idea Into a Collection

Zhen Zeng, #100Drawingsof2Things

Where do great illustration ideas come from? I often find myself spending more time searching for ideas rather than acting on one. Then this idea hit me: what if I added a tiny bit of constraint and just let serendipity take care of the rest? To do that, I made a jar full of tiny cards with a unique word written on each. Every day, I would pick two cards at random and use them as inspiration for what to draw. The combos were always surprising, a little whimsical, and sometimes a bit weird, like Giraffe + Sweatpants, Pizza + Umbrella. I looked forward to each new combo as much as the viewers did.

However, like many #100DayProject participants, I found it difficult to actually create something every day. What kept me going was the motivation to push my creativity, the project was the best way to prove my commitment to others, and more importantly, myself. After countless attempts at completing illustration series (not sure why my ideas always come in the form of series), I simply refused to wave the white flag this time around. So in the end, this project was more about 100 pieces rather than 100 days.

A Word to a Story

Nuri Kim, #100WordsBookKor

For my 100 Day Project, I created a book with 100 words to pass along to my future daughter. From this project, I learned that you can create a compelling story with just one word, as long as you have a clear audience in mind.

I picked one word per day and drew a simple illustration of it, and wrote the word in both English and Korean at the bottom. Each time I picked a word I was also creating a story around the word to make my daughter more curious and imaginative about the world she will see. As of today I am at 86, and the little girl in my mind is waiting for the next page.

Inspiration Takes Effort

Ching Lai, #AHundredMonsters

Before the 100 Day Project, I pretty much drew monsters when an idea conveniently hit. The thought of creating them every day, in front of an audience (and for 100 consecutive days!) was a new concept to me. But the pressure turned out to be effective.

After a wave of initial ideas, I wasn’t sure how to stay inspired. My usual go-to’s for creative inspiration — art books, blogs, art galleries, museums, and current events — weren’t enough anymore. So I searched elsewhere, and hard. I started scanning my immediate environment for ideas — even if I was in the hardware store, listening to a song, or mid-conversation with a friend. But sometimes, all it took was putting pencil to paper for a creature to emerge too. By putting in the effort upfront and drawing shapes and eyes, new and unexpected creatures formed on their own.

Lessons from a Non-Finisher

Stacey Corwin Farrelly, #sdcfpaints

Starting the 100 Days Project amplified my (faulty) sense that designers need to be masters of every visual craft. For my project, I was set on not only doing something every day, for 100 days, but teaching myself a new design skill. For some reason, I actually expected to pick up a brush and just be a great artist. I didn’t think about the patience and time and skill it takes to actually learn a new craft. I felt like as a designer it was my duty to just. be. good. at. everything.

Looking back, I’d like to say that time got in my way of completing the project, but I’m sure it was also the struggle of not being good or patient enough to see it through. As designers, we need to lean on each other to build on our skills — something I should have done more of during the process instead of being so determined to do it on my own.

So what did I really learn?

Admit to not knowing: The first step to being really great at something is acknowledging how far you have to go. I’ve seen that idea come to life in my daily work and it’s taken me from a black and white, wireframer to a bonafide product-shipping designer.

Getting comfortable with not being good is hard. That’s also what makes it so rewarding.

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That’s a wrap on this project. Stay tuned for more comings and going from the Uber Design team. As always, we’re hiring! And if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how our design team can continue its love fest, please share with us on Twitter.

This post was compiled by Stacey Corwin Farrelly. Thanks to Marissa Coren and Ethan Eismann for editing.

#UberDesignx100 was originally published in Uber Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous in our lives and a networked economy emerges, it’s important for companies to understand the physical, emotional, and social contexts in which people engage with their products. This is especially important for Uber and other technology-enabled services that depend upon interactions and experiences that happen outside of an app. Our end-to-end user experience spans multiple modes and locations, and asks customers to engage in both digital and physical interactions — sometimes at the same time.

In an ideal world, we could design every moment of that journey to ensure comfort, safety, and ease-of use. But in the real world, key service moments are affected by factors beyond our control: public infrastructure, differences between riders and driver-partners, including varying social and cultural norms, and even the way the sun hits a partner’s windshield in the early morning. While we can’t predict or control these things, we can design for the need to adapt and respond to such dynamic factors. However, before we can design a solution, we need to clearly define the problem.

The Uber Design Research team uses a range of research methods to uncover what matters most to riders and partners, and how our product helps or hinders them as they go about their lives. Often, we invite them to our lab to participate in interviews and usability studies. We also conduct phone interviews, surveys, and unmoderated usability studies to reach riders and partners all around the world. Getting research participants who visit our lab to tell us stories about their lives, and not just about our products, is one way to discover moments of friction in the product flow. But there are certain things participants may never think to tell us. Frequently, these are moments they don’t recognize as disruptions to their experience, but rather, they see them as small annoyances or frustrations that they have adjusted to over time.

To catch a glimpse of these small but highly significant moments, we need to conduct field research. Field research, put very simply, is getting out of the lab and into the world to talk with and observe people in their environment. It’s trying our best to walk in their shoes, see their point of view, and understand the context they live and work in. By seeing it ourselves, we recognize workarounds, physical artifacts, and motivations that are essentially invisible to our participants.

Uber is one of the most fast-paced startups in the world. Some might argue that field research would slow down a company of this velocity, but it actually saves us time. We could spend an hour interviewing someone telling us about their experiences or we could take an Uber ride with them and see their point of view first-hand.

Field research uncovers workarounds

When researching a new feature for the Uber Partner app, Grace Vorreuter will go out driving with partners and give them real world scenarios and tasks to test. Since she is getting into their car, she gets to observe not just how the app is functioning, but also physical artifacts that the partner interacts with. Some partners mount their phones on the left side, some on the right, while some prop it up in their cup holder. We take note of the arm’s-length gestures the partner makes to interact with our app and how it’s difficult to see the screen when there’s a glare — all things we could never encounter if trying to replicate these scenarios in the lab. We also see workarounds that partners create to fill in the gaps of their work flow.

While studying the new partner app on-trip flow, Grace conducted in-the-car research, running partners through different test scenarios. During one of these tests, she discovered that one partner had created a contact in his phone called “muppet,” which had the anonymized phone number of his upcoming rider. He did this so that he could easily call the rider using the voice command “call muppet!” A partner might not mention in an interview that he or she had created this workaround — by going out into the field to conduct this test in real driving scenarios, we were able to learn about this unmet need and this one partner’s unique solution.

Field research shows the effects of physical environment

In a sense, every Uber employee is conducting research every time he or she takes a ride. This helps create empathy across our organization for riders and partners. However, we are aware that our experiences in San Francisco or other US cities are not representative of the range of experiences users have with Uber across the world. When Amy Chong went to Guangzhou and Shanghai in China, she noticed important differences in the physical environment that are unique to those locations and cannot be understood from a distance. For instance, barriers that are meant to control pedestrian entry onto roadways extend multiple blocks along the sides of roads in Guangzhou and Shanghai. Amy also saw that highways run above street level in downtown Shanghai. These seemingly small physical differences could wreak havoc on uberPOOL pickups.

Imagine you are an uberPOOL passenger and you’ve just been matched with another rider who is standing on the other side of the street — in seemingly close proximity. In Guangzhou, a partner may need to drive more than four blocks to reach an opening where they can turn around and drive to the second rider. Or, imagine you’re riding on one of the highways above Shanghai when you’re matched with another rider, but that person is standing below you on the street level. Your Uber Partner would need to exit the highway and wind their way down to the street level and then return to the highway again. A car-sharing nightmare! Had we spoken to a rider from Guangzhou or Shanghai over the phone, they might have told us that wait times for uberPOOL are long. But they might not have thought to mention the physical details of their environment because they are immersed in it. Yet, it’s critical for Uber to consider these factors when calculating the estimated time of arrival for a partner in Guangzhou and Shanghai.

Field research reveals motivations and embedded attitudes

It’s one thing for an UberRUSH bike messenger, known as a “Courier,” to tell us about what it’s like to deliver a package from Chelsea to the West Village in New York City. It’s another thing to ride behind him as he navigates vehicles, avoids pedestrians and struggles to mark a job “complete” using the app on a snow-soaked iPhone screen.

Braving a bike ride on a cold February day allowed Design researcher Alisa Weinstein and UberRUSH’s lead designer, Brion McDonough, to see the tension between the needs and motivations of customers requesting an UberRUSH delivery and Couriers making the delivery. Customers often don’t consider how an item is transported from point A to point B — just that it gets where it needs to be as quickly as possible. Couriers, however, are primarily thinking about how a package will affect their ride. Their ability to navigate the city streets and control their body and bike is central to making a safe, successful delivery.

So while a customer may not be focused on the size, shape, and weight of a package, the Courier knows those factors affect his balance. Understanding the motivations of different actors in an end-to-end experience helped Alisa and Brion design with both sets of needs in mind. They may not have understood the importance of the physicality of the job had they not been there to see it for themselves.

Like any exploratory research method, fieldwork is an excellent tool for uncovering previously unknown or little-known motivations and problems that affect the way services are used and perceived. Sometimes the solutions or next steps are clear, but other times we may learn something that isn’t immediately actionable. This is often why some teams may push back against doing this kind of in-depth, exploratory research. But, we believe the payoff for this type of research is worth the time invested because the insights are so much more rich, nuanced, and tangible.

Field research is especially effective when product managers, engineers, and designers venture into the field with us to observe. When this happens, we see them internalize the experiences and stories much more than bullet points presented in a research report. We’ve seen these team members become stronger advocates for research, and also riders and partners, because they’re drawing from their own first-hand experiences in the field. Our field research gives our designers the confidence and conviction to design from a place of knowledge and deep understanding of riders and partners, rather than from a place of speculation and guesswork.

Contributors:

Grace Vorreuter is a design researcher on the Driving Experience team at Uber. Grace enjoys bad movies, cross stitching, and people-watching. She also puts way too much sugar in her coffee.

Amy Chong is a design researcher who focuses on experiences and initiatives related to Supply Growth at Uber. She loves to travel and run marathons; running a marathon on every continent is on her must-do list.

Alisa Weinstein is a design researcher at Uber who has worked with the Uber Everything, Uber for Business and Partnerships teams. She is a passionate armchair TV critic and has a Masters in Design from the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.

Thanks to Shruti Kataria and Rick Bond for your editing help!

If this sort of research interests you, the Uber Design Research Team is hiring. Please get in touch with us! It’s not a requirement that you wear glasses…

Field Research at Uber was originally published in Uber Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design is different here. We come to work each day inspired by the future and eager to be a part of it.

We spend every day thinking about new ways to improve cities for the riders and drivers who live in them. With your unique perspective, our dreams for tomorrow will move closer to reality.

We believe in

Improving cities

Every project at Uber begins in an effort to improve both cities and the lives of people who live in them.

Seeking big opportunities

Technology changes quickly, and we always want to stay one step ahead. By focusing on the future we can realize bigger opportunities.

Making magic

Every experience should be magic. When people use our apps, we want them to wonder how they ever lived without them.

Experimenting with design

With every project, we learn more about what works. We test our assumptions constantly to make sure our designs really work.

Being impactful

Our designs are used by millions around the world every day. We try hard to simplify and improve our customers’ lives.

Find the perfect fit

We’re looking for talented creatives from all disciplines. Our team is focused on a common goal of creating beautiful, functional designs. We’d love for you to join us. Discover the right role for you.

Product Design

We’re constantly inventing, iterating, and increasing transportation opportunities for everyone, everywhere. As a diverse team of researchers, strategists, designers, and writers, we’re focused on improving current features and imagining new futures for our technology through magical user experiences.

“We’re designing experiences that don’t exist yet. Because of that, we’re constantly innovating and improving what we’re making. It’s an amazing challenge, and it’s also incredibly rewarding.” — Amritha Prasad, Product Designer

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Brand Design

Our team creates the architecture behind Uber’s global identity. We launch campaigns and design standards that give Uber a cohesive look and feel. Our team includes designers, producers, copywriters, illustrators, and videographers.

“I joined because I liked that Uber was building creative teams and sharing their design process. I’m very excited to learn from my experienced peers and grow alongside the team.” — Alice Yang, Illustrator

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Marketing Design

Our team of marketing professionals creates emails, social posts, websites, and digital ads to benefit our rider and driver communities. We use data to inform and iterate on our designs, and we’re proud of our industry-leading response rates.

“Art and science hold hands here. There are tons of opportunities to be creative — which is sometimes unexpected at a tech company.”- Chris Lohouse, Motion Designer

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Design is different here. was originally published in Uber Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.