RideAmigos — Simplifying Commuting by Reinventing Mobility

RideAmigos is a US-based commuter engagement hub, used by businesses and communities to help commuters overcome parking, traffic and pollution issues. Thousands of organizations, including top employers, government agencies, and universities use RideAmigos to understand and incentivize commuters to make smarter choices—reducing congestion, parking demand, and environmental impact, all while improving wellness. RideAmigos’ powerful platform and programs bring together a broad range of fragmented mobility solutions with behavioral science to change the way the world commutes.

The RideAmigos.com platform was already offering an excellent service, but there were significant challenges in terms of usability, design, and visual language. For their next leap forward – becoming a leading global commuting services provider as rapidly as possible – RideAmigos established some goals: enhance the user experience, create a more recognizable brand, and design a digital product that consumers would love to use.

To create value for the client, we aligned all our actions to integrate the user experience with RideAmigos main business goals. To this end, we first evaluated all business-relevant KPIs and then streamlined the user experience design efforts according to those metrics. To get everybody onto the same page right from the start, we focused on quickly visualizing relevant possible solutions as design prototypes.

RideAmigos, based in Los Angeles, (CA/USA), is a platform for commuter management solutions. The platform is used by governmental, corporate, and campus commuting networks. The main features include multi-mode travel dashboards, incentives and reward systems, and intelligent ride mapping. One essential core functionality of the platform is trip detection and confirmation. With the RideAmigos companion app, users can log their commutes on a daily basis on their phones.

The RideAmigos vision is to make commuter transportation management as easy as possible while providing employees with a better commute, thus creating a better world.

We faced a significant challenge: creating a visual concept for the RideAmigos platform that followed a comprehensive visual narrative while simultaneously working on the user experience design of the web platform. Then the actual RideAmigos brand should be crystallized out.

Ideally, when we are asked to design a product, we work on the basis of an existing brand. Usually, the brand is there – the logo, colors, typography, and visual storytelling. Then the products would follow. We decided to start with the web platform, as it was the central hub and seemed like the most natural place to begin.

To make the RideAmigos platform and furthermore the brand itself very recognizable, we created a concept of utopian environmentalism that brought clarity and focus to the RideAmigos vision. Step by step, we introduced illustrations that gave the platform its own visual language along with a more distinctive and unique appeal. Next, we created a lot of the user interface, defined the color set, chose typography and applied icons. We kind of kick-started a unified RideAmigos visual language.

After finishing with the web platform, we took on the companion app and also the official RideAmigos corporate website at the same time. The challenge was to expand the visual language of utopian environmentalism, moving out from the RideAmigos web platform to all digital venues.

To make sure all visual language and user interface design activities in the companion app lead to great overall user experience and meet user expectations, we ran extended user test sessions. We tried out different branding and UI elements to find out which ones worked for the testing groups and which ones didn’t. This process allowed us to focus and refine the direction of the look and feel of the user interface of the platform and the companion app.

We realized something as we dove more deeply into the commuting app and the actual website: adding more personality to the illustrations and using them as a means to tell a story around utopian environmentalism is key to the overall success of the brand.

We came up with a set of beautiful characters who represent the typical commuters who use the RideAmigos trip detection app. We placed these commuters in everyday situations like traveling on a bus or riding a bike (both clearly happy with their commutes). This enabled us to explain different app functions, for instance how to swipe to access more data.

We also created charming characters that we used to make the app’s onboarding process a great experience, thus lowering the bounce rate. Furthermore, we added more iconography to the statistics section and combined everything into the final website design in the end.

Our final solution encompasses several advantages — a memorable and visually appealing brand design, an exceptional UX and a simple user interface for the mobile app.

The visual language of the mobile app and the web app were unified, and visual storytelling was also used to make the service more understandable. The brand was generally more emotionally charged and the fun of using it was put in the foreground.