Product Design Challenge #4: Uber
Launching a new way for people to order drinks and snacks for their ride
👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.
Scenario
You are working for Uber as part of the passenger special projects team. Your team comprises a product manager, two full-stack engineers, a content designer, and a user researcher.
Intro
The Uber commercial team is considering testing a new initiative for passengers: allowing them to pre-order drinks and snacks for their rides.
Rides less than 15’ long allow users to preorder drinks (water, iced coffee and tea, soft drinks).
Rides longer than 15’ also allow users to preorder specific types of packaged snacks (crisps, puffs)
Uber drivers will stock some of these items in the car trunk in special fridges & containers. Only selected, high-rated Uber drivers will participate in this program, so the service won’t always be available to the passenger.
Your product squad has been tasked with developing a prototype for this new experience, testing it with users, and evaluating its viability.
Goal
Come up with a high-fidelity flow and prototype to allow users to pre-order drinks and snacks when hailing an Uber.
Think of the end-to-end user flow;
How would you announce this feature to users?
When should the user see this option?
How do they order and pay?
Make sure to include happy and unhappy paths;
What happens if an item is out of stock?
What happens if drinks aren’t cold yet?
What happens if a driver doesn’t offer this service?
Include a way for the user to rate their ordering experience.
Deliverable
(Optional) Interview 1-2 people who use Uber regularly for longer rides and test their intent to have drinks or snacks onboard.
(Optional) Use sketching or low-fidelity wireframing to generate a few ideas of how this flow would work.
Define what metrics or qualitative data you plan to gather and evaluate to test the viability, usability, and satisfaction of this new experience. What commercial and product metrics are important? What research methods are you planning on using to get deeper insight?
Mock up the experience in Figma and create a rough prototype. If you are practicing your UI skills, recreate the app from scratch. Otherwise, try a file from the Figma community and use the public Uber Base Gallery.
Sharing your work
This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.
Recommended tools
Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation
Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition
Figma for mockups and prototypes
This challenge will help you with
Product thinking
UI Design
UX Design
Prototyping
Disclaimer
This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.