HIGHLIGHTS
- Uber Lite app was relaunched in India in June final yr
- The app presently helps English, Portuguese, and Spanish
- Uber’s Bengaluru tech center has approximately two hundred human beings overall
Uber’s remaining year launched the Uber Lite app for Android. The lightweight app, touted eighty-five percent smaller in its download length than the regular Uber app – exactly just 5MB in size – was first launched in India. It became, in fact, the brainchild of the crew primarily based out of Uber’s Bengaluru tech center. The middle goal at the back of the Uber Lite app was to supply a cozy revel to customers who are new to smartphones or who own entry-stage Android gadgets with low garage and negative community connectivity. However, the San Francisco, California-primarily based cab aggregator is now taking a step in advance and adding new functions to its ‘lite’ app to carry new riders on board.
“Our users have resonated properly with the enjoyment that we’ve created,” Shirish Andhare, Head of Product and Growth, India — Uber, says in a conversation with Gadgets 360. “It [Uber Lite] is staying in India and 14 international locations in Latin America, with Brazil and Mexico — some of our biggest markets. We’ve crossed more than a million installs.“”
The Uber Lite app presently supports English, Portuguese, and Spanish. However, Andhare notes that because vernacular is thought to be a vital driving force of cellphone adoption in India, his crew is actively considering the addition of a few Indic languages, including Hindi. The Uber Lite group had initially deliberated the debut of Hindi and a few other key Indian languages for September’s final year. However, that plan has yet to take form.
“We generally revel in, get the outcomes, after which form of making investments more closely in those regions,” the government says. “But we’re searching at Hindi and, in all likelihood, the top-seven Indic languages for India to experience and see if we get the person adoption progressed and allow the consolation stage with the app, after which we will move from there.”
Some interesting trends are also taking place at Uber’s tech center in Bengaluru. Andhare warned that the paintings across the Indic language integration into the Uber Lite app are currently at a totally early stage. “We are also operating on an offline app, and perhaps using speech reputation or voice search, to make the experience of reserving a ride smoother,” divulges Andhare without detailing any specifics.
A journey from zero to greater than 1,000,000 journeys
Andhare and his group of engineers, statistics scientists, and researchers at the Bengaluru tech center have brought the Uber Lite app from 0 to one million journeys throughout over 14 countries in less than a year, given that its launch returned in June, closing 12 months.
“The idea at the back of Uber Lite was literally to create a mild, immediate, and easy software that works for our customers specifically in emerging markets on traditional gadgets, and additionally folks that are new to the smartphone user interfaces and are not completely technologically savvy,” says Andhare.
Uber’s Bengaluru tech center currently has approximately two hundred humans, though the intention was to more than double the engineering headcount in 2019.
To begin with, the team behind the Uber Lite app prepared a list of features that were available in the original Uber app. But rather than ditching the features in the Lite app, the plan is to reduce the steps involved in reserving a cab from the unique app.
“One of our observations turned into that during mature programs, we require users to make many more than one decision on every screen,” mentions Andhare. “If you have a look at Uber Lite, we’ve minimized that. We need them to be relaxed and confident about that one selection they want to make – whether or not it’s my pick-out location, destination, the sort of automobile I need, and the sort of charge device earlier than I ebook. Sebooke damaged it. That simplicity requires us to be informed about the capabilities we need to feature.”
To provide a cozy experience with the Uber Lite app, Andhare’s crew eliminated the visual appearance of maps. This helped customers choose their pick-up factor from a list of interest factors instead of selecting any precise area on the map.
“The thrilling component is all of this nonetheless is maps facts – it is simply no longer the visual,” underlines Andhare. “But the net result is we ended up having a map-constrained app, which permits us to make the app even lighter, which we make simpler for the consumer to enjoy.”
Naman Mathur, one of the middle researchers at the back of the Uber Lite app, talks about the challenges Uber confronted while developing the app: affordability, connectivity, and ease.
“More than a 3rd of those customers come from connectivity zones which might be lesser than 3G,” states Mathur. “We noticed that this demographic of customers had been pressured by the characteristics of maps, so after our user studies, we reinterpreted the app’s design to cater to their concerns. We made the map less congested, with fewer pointers, and closely relied on factors of a hobby as we realized that maximum riders experience extra relaxation with that form of region tracking.”
Since the Uber Lite app is designed for entry-stage Android devices with a smaller display screen area than regular smartphones, the crew has used the principle of ‘tap before kind.’
“We approached the designers of the app with this precept of ‘faucet earlier than kind,'” says Andhare. “The tap earlier than type means that the app surfaces more information that customers can type as opposed to having to type long addresses and so forth.” “This concept of [the] tap before type got here from looking at the sizes of telephones and the manner users use the keyboard,” he maintains.
Andhare additionally highlights that the Uber Lite app is pickup-first, whereas the regular Uber app is a destination-first solution. “It [the regular Uber app] right away asks you where you need to go,” he says. But our app says where we must pick you up—is this the right vicinity to select you?”
The Uber Lite group visited Brazil, Mexico, and India to explore a diffusion of paradigms and locate the most suitable model. Importantly, rival Ola introduced the Ola Lite app months before the Uber Lite launch. However, the crew led by Andhare used a special method, and WhatsApp was their proposal.
“We met a grandmother, who turned into like, I assume 60 years old, and she turned into using WhatsApp and YouTube variously and yet when we asked her to an ebook thaebookoys on our app, it turned into a bit hard for her,” remembers Andhare. “So one interesting concept we explored earlier changed into if humans are acquainted with chat and may want to assist it if we create a booking experience that looks extra like a chat verbal exchange. We experimented with that.”
To provide an instant messaging app-like enjoy through the Uber Lite app, Andhare and his teammates deployed a one-contact booking waft and simple steps that are being guided to users.
“We learned that at the same time as users had been very relaxed chatting on WhatsApp, they had been not completely at ease having an enjoy outside of WhatsApp that had any of these elements, and we stated k, a guided, easy step-with the aid of-step flow is virtually plenty higher in this interaction,” says Andhare. “We learned that a guided waft is vital, so instead of leaving all the decisions to the consumer to find out, we sincerely manually the user.”
Initially, the Uber Lite app failed to support primary capabilities, including the Uber Pool integration and Paytm as a payment method. The team updated the app in December to add each popular capability. However, the app still does not permit customers in India to apply for credit scores or debit cards to make payments.
The digital pocket payments were observed to be, in reality, extra famous inside the U. S. A. Andhare tells Gadgets 360 that even though his team does allow payments via credit score and debit playing cards in Latin America, it nevertheless now not let in Indian users for paying through playing cards as coins enjoy. Nonetheless, they’re receiving requests to add UPI assistance.
“We’re always looking to study from the marketplace,” the government affirms. In truth, we’ve got a few reviews on when UPI is coming, whether I can pay using a card, and so forth. So we monitor these indicators.”
Unlike the authentic app, Uber Lite also lacks rider rankings. Andhare, though, mentions that riders’ own rankings are never absolutely long past. “At a few points, we’ll carry it,” he assures. But we felt it became vital to check our center hypothesis, which is this guided glide.”
“We make the decisions carefully to make this app easy and the selection-making very simple and relatively clutter-loose. But if we see a sturdy, sufficient sign and call from our users, now that we have an awesome, important mass of customers using the app, we’ll make sure that we prioritize this stuff over time,” he adds.
To assist 2G-type network situations at the Uber Lite app, the crew has implemented caching for popular locations. “When you begin typing, even though the community isn’t that exquisite because a number of the popular destinations are already on the app—in its database—those destinations display up way extra quick than having to move across a terrible community to get that reaction again,” Andhare explains.
I need Jamil and Anurag Arora from the Product Design Team at the back of the Uber Lite app to inform Gadgets 360 that they’ve made the app “more faucet-in a position” and “greater convenient” for users compared to the regular Uber app after collating statistics primarily based on frequent places and records of rides through knowledge of the existing consumer base.
“To make certain that our crew continues to thrive for simplicity while new features are being brought, we continually move lower back to our layout ideas and spot if we are doing sufficient justice to create the only experience possible for our end customers,” the engineers said.
Affordability – the next huge consciousness vicinity
While the Uber Lite crew, under the management of Andhare, has controlled to construct a successful answer for first-time smartphone users, it is only to draw human beings for whom Uber as a cab service continues to be a top-class alternative.
“We do trust that for this audience, as a way to make Uber a habit, first of all, we want to offer them an app that in reality works and they are secure with, and secondly, we want to provide the products that simply match of their day by day lifestyle and their budget,” says Andhare. “So if you see Uber Lite, we’re already surfacing Moto and Auto where these are available within the towns. And affordability is a key-key place for the business enterprise normal.”
Uber currently has UberGo because it is the lowest-priced alternative for a private tour. However, the corporation ought to offer different models to penetrate price-touchy markets like India.
“Having better capability motors, as an example, is one possible location that we should spend money on and adapt that to these markets,” presumes Andhare. “The other is simply making matters more green typical and also taking existing models like Pool and others and adapting them to the needs of precise markets like India.”
“Lots of questioning occurring; however, Uber Bus is a great instance of what we introduced in Cairo that would potentially be applicable even in these markets wherein affordability can certainly force normal utilization of secure, at-ease transportation,” he concludes.
