TECH SUPPORT
What small-business owners need to know about technology.
Last year, three friends who were making arrangements to drive to the famous Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert concluded that there was great interest in ride-sharing but no easy way to match up those who had space in their cars with those who needed rides and would help pay for gas and other expenses. So they set up Burningmanrides.com.
It went so smoothly that the site became a small hit, setting up 1,600 rides within a few weeks. And that led the three friends to think about offering the same sort of ride-matching service to any location on any date. At first glance, that may sound like a simple extension of the service, but in fact, it was a huge leap in complexity to a sort of free-form, nationwide mass-transit system. And the founders of the new service, called Ridejoy, which they introduced late last year, have put a lot of work into creating a Web site that invites potential users to give the service a try. “With Burningmanrides, it was very obvious what we offering,” said Jason Shen, one of the site’s founders. “We needed a new model for Ridejoy.”
One of the challenges that the site faces is that most people who come for the first time have either the college “ride board” model or the Craigslist model in mind. A ride board, of course, is a physical bulletin board where students can pin a note specifying where they’re driving or where they’re hoping to get a ride and allowing people to see at a glance whether there’s a match. On Craigslist, on the other hand, you can jump to a city, select “rideshare,” and see a bunch of rides being offered out of that city. Both models work, in part, because the number of listings is usually small enough to allow easy scanning.
But it’s not so easy on a Web site that currently lists more than 2,000 rides among more than 500 cities and can succeed only if customers find what they’re looking for. Clearly, the site has to let users narrow the possibilities, which means the users have to provide some information. “Having to sift through all those listings would drive people away,” said Randy Pang, another co-founder. “It’s too much work. We just needed people to tell us where they wanted to go, and we could help make it happen.”
It’s easy enough to ask for starting and ending locations and for the desired date of travel. But would customers be comfortable going to an unfamiliar Web site and typing in information about their planned trip? Thus the first challenge was designing a home page that would prompt customers to provide enough information to get the process going without making them nervous. To balance the potentially conflicting needs of soliciting information, raising comfort levels and hiding complexity, the Ridejoy home page features three simple elements.
The first is a place to provide the four key pieces of information: driver versus rider, starting point, ending point and date of travel. The second element, just below it, is a list of popular ride-sharing destinations or departure points — so that users familiar with ride boards or Craigslist can begin by narrowing the choices to a single “hub” that represents their destination. (The site is focusing on West Coast locations for now but plans to branch out in the coming months.) The third element, near the bottom of the page, is a single strip that displays one of the listings on the site, along with the lister’s first name — a bit like an index card on a ride board. “We were trying to capture the experience of feeling you’re going on a real trip with a real person,” Mr. Shen said. The strip switches listings every few seconds, communicating that there are a variety of listings.
A simple logo prominently splashed across the top of the home page reads, “Share rides with friendly people.” That phrase gets at what is probably the biggest barrier that Ridejoy has to confront: the issue of trust. Taking a ride with a stranger or taking a stranger into your car is inevitably a leap of faith. Arranging the ride on the Internet can add another layer of concern. Ridejoy’s intended solution is pasted right underneath those sample ride listings. Every one of them comes with an invitation to “Sign up to see if you have any mutual friends on Facebook” — that is, if you share any friends with the person who posted the listing.
If you click on that invitation, you’ll be prompted to log on to Ridejoy with your Facebook log on, which means Ridejoy now has your basic profile information, including your profile picture. Clearly, the chance to gain that familiar footing appeals to most Ridejoy users — nearly 90 percent of them do in fact link through Facebook. Thus, most listings include a profile picture and offer a look at the user’s public Facebook information. “We want everything to feel as friendly as possible,” Mr. Pang said.
Ridejoy is hiding a lot of high-powered complexity behind the intended simplicity of the home page. Consider, for example, that an offered or desired ride can start anywhere, end up anywhere, and happen on any date or time. That means the chances that everyone or even most people who come to the site will find an exact match are not high. So the site’s computers churn through all the possibilities to find the closest matches — perhaps a ride that leaves from a nearby city, or that leaves a day later. If nothing clicks, a notification service lets you know if a new listing comes along that might meet your needs.
There is also an optional credit-card-based advance-payment system that takes the uncertainty of cash transactions out of the picture and helps users determine fair prices for sharing expenses. “One by one, we’re trying to remove all the obstacles to sharing rides,” Mr. Shen said. “We want to refine the experience so it stays really simple, but it’s also highly functional.”
Please take a look at Ridejoy and tell us if you think the owners have hit the right notes. Do you have other questions or concerns?
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