3 Million Uber Drivers Are
About to Get a New Boss
Inside Uber’s latest attempt to rebuild its app for drivers, the
iggest experiment in the gig economy.
ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL
APR 10, 2018
https:
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/uber-driver-app-revamp/557117
UBER
Every day, the world’s 3 million Uber drivers spend 8.5 million hours logged into the ride-
hailing company’s app. That’s roughly 1,000 years of Uber driving packed into any given 24
hours.
Because of this tremendous scale, Uber is the most important test case for the gig economy,
the new economic a
angement where contract workers are a
anged into a cohesive labor
force by software. There are many companies that share Uber’s controversial approach to
doling out work, but none has amassed 3 million people who use the service to try to make
money. Never before has an app’s design been so important to so many people.
The Uber app is the drivers’ workplace, as much as the city where they’re driving is. Each
decision about its interface structures drivers’ interactions with Uber the company as well as
Uber the transportation marketplace. And Uber is now putting the finishing touches on a
from-scratch rebuild of the driver app.
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www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/uber-driver-app-revamp/557117
The new build of the app draws on technological components of the new rider app, which
launched last year. But creating something for drivers is different. An Uber rider needs an
app that’s simple and fast; drivers’ experience of the app is much deeper.
The new version will begin rolling out in the next few weeks, and in an interview with The
Atlantic, Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said it embodies the new, kinder Uber. Hundreds
of drivers were involved in providing detailed ideas and feedback about how the app should
work.
“Drivers have lived with our tools every single day, and the insight that they
ing into our
app and our experience on the road is unique,” said Khosrowshahi, who has even tried
driving himself. “We would be fools not to use their experience in helping design not just
our software, but in thinking about our business.”
So Yuhki Yamashita, the product manager for driver experience, and Haider Sa
i, the
engineering lead, spearheaded a new design process that sought to
ing “builders” (Uber’s
terminology for engineers and designers) closer to the drivers who will be using their
software. It’s one of the things that Uber can do now. Back when the last driver app was
introduced in 2015, there were about 30 engineers working on the app, Sa
i said. Now
there are hundreds.
Members of the app-building team embedded with hundreds of drivers in Los Angeles;
Cairo; Bangalore, India; London; Melbourne, Australia; Jakarta, Indonesia; and São Paolo,
Brazil. Drivers could send WhatsApp messages to individual researchers, attend group
lunches, or do rides with members of the Uber team using the new app.
Instead of taking all that information and processing it into one or several reports, they
created a private Google Plus community (yes G+ still exists!) so that engineers and
designers could immediately see feedback coming in from all over the world. Some drivers
ecorded vlogs reviewing the new app. Others sent detailed messages with screenshots to
point out concerns.
The result of that research and building process is a new app that the team hopes will be, as
they put it, “empowering” and “personal,” and more understanding of how drivers move
through their days (and nights) on the platform.
Most intriguingly, the new app will take a more directive approach to making suggestions to
drivers about where to go and what to do. It will not only offer single proposals about areas
to drive, but offer unprecedented visibility into what Uber’s back-end software predicts is
going to happen across a city.
The redesign of Uber’s driver app began before the company’s “180 Days of Change”
campaign, which launched last June while Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder and former CEO,
was taking a leave of absence, and prior to when Khosrowshahi became the company’s
chief. Kalanick was forced out by major shareholders after months of news stories about
Uber’s “aggressive” culture and te
ible treatment of female employees, and
Kalanick’s nasty confrontation with a driver. The six-month program was supposed to
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www.uber.com/c/180-days/summary
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www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace-culture.html
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eflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-ube
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www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/fe
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“meaningfully improve” the driver experience. It began with a splash: the announcement
that Uber, contrary to a long-stated position, would introduce tipping.
Uber notes that it made 38 changes as a result of the process and feedback from drivers,
ut the reviews on driver websites and forums indicate that drivers remain unsatisfied.
Some driver-friendly measures—like allowing them greater flexibility in picking which
direction their rides take them—had to be walked back. Others—like paying them back for
tolls incu
ed while getting to riders—never launched. And even when it came to tipping,
some drivers felt Uber needed to encourage tipping within the rider app’s interface.
In 2018, Uber’s new motto has been “building together.” The company held a first-of-its-
kind forum with drivers and Khosrowshahi in January and has continued to talk a much
etter game about the people working on the platform.
There is one big reason to believe that Uber might be serious about treating drivers better:
Acquiring and keeping drivers on the platform is a major expense. The ride-hailing business
is a complex two-sided market, where companies like Uber and Lyft have to compete for
oth drivers and riders. One way they do so is subsidizing the cost of rides, paying drivers
more and charging riders less than is profitable. That’s a major contributor to why both
companies have lost staggering sums of money so far. Uber, for example, lost $4.5 billion in
2017 and $2.8 billion in XXXXXXXXXXLyft’s revenues and losses are both much smaller.)
The most obvious thing that keeps drivers happy is more money. “We have mostly been
talking with drivers about basic per-mileage rates, deactivation issues, and other
ead and
utter concerns,” said Jeff Ordower of Silicon Valley Rising, a group that’s beginning to try to
organize drivers in the Bay.
But pay is not the only consideration. Serious investigations of how it feels to work for Uber
have found a variety of considerations, big and small, that shape the driver experience.
Luke Stark, a media-studies scholar at Dartmouth College, and Alex Rosenblat, an
ethnographer at the Data and Society Research Institute, explored the specific working
conditions designed into the Uber app in a 2016 paper. For example, drivers are not given
passenger-destination information before they accept a ride. This is good for riders, as Uber
drivers cannot discriminate based on where they’re headed, but it means that drivers have
to accept the ride “blind,” which can lead to unprofitable trips. “You’re driving around
lind,” one driver told Stark and Rosenblat. “When it does ping, you might drive 15 minutes
to drive someone half a mile. There’s no money in it in that point, especially in my SUV.”
The app is both the factory and the boss, and its design has ramifications on drivers’
autonomy, power, earnings, and quality of life. The technical system determines how rides
are assigned, how much drivers get paid for each ride, and how workers are evaluated
through rider ratings and other factors. These kinds of tasks all used to fall to humans. Now
they don’t. Carnegie Mellon researchers have termed these new forms of organizational
control “algorithmic management.”
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usiness/technology/la-fi-hy-uber XXXXXXXXXXstory.html
https:
therideshareguy.com/grading-uber-on-their-180-days-of-change/#more-19937
https:
uberpeople.net/threads/180-days-of-change-recap.247755
https:
www.uber.com
log/180-days-of-change-building-together-in-2018
https:
www.cnbc.com/2018/02/13/ubers-loss-jumped-61-percent-to-4-point-5-billion-in-2017.html
https:
www.cnbc.com/2018/02/13/ubers-loss-jumped-61-percent-to-4-point-5-billion-in-2017.html
http:
money.cnn.com/2017/04/14/technology/uber-financials/index.html
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www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ XXXXXXXXXX/lyft-set-to-claim-third-of-u-s-market-in-2017-document-shows
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ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/4892/1739
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ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/4892/1739
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www.cs.cmu.edu/~mklee/materials/Publication/2015-CHI_algorithmic_management.pdf
“Through the Uber app’s design and deployment, the company produces the equivalent
effects of what most reasonable observers would define as a managed labor force,” write
Stark and Rosenblat. “At the same time, the decentralized structure of Uber’s systems and
their rhetorical invocation of ‘platforms’ and ‘algorithms’ may render the impression that
Uber has a limited managerial role over driver behaviors.”
Whether this kind of management is better or worse for drivers than traditional taxi
management is an open question writers like Tim O’Reilly have been exploring, but it is
different: The management possibilities are centralized in the company design process and
delivered via mobile phone.
The Uber driver app has to do a wide variety of things. The app must allow drivers in cities
across the globe to find people, provide rides, and deliver food. It must push drivers to the
places where riders are waiting, balancing the market’s supply and demand. And, from
Uber’s perspective, it must give drivers the tools to run their own one-person taxi business.
The company viewed the old app as a “one-stop shop to run your business,” Yamashita said.
The main non-driving screen was a kind of “news feed” with different promotions, events,
and other announcements that could be pushed to drivers by corporate or city operational
teams. Drivers often found the number of data points overwhelming (or underwhelming).
There was an earnings tab that let you see how much money you’d made. There was a
atings tab that helped you keep an eye on your rank within the system.
“With the old app, the attitude was: ‘Here’s a bunch of information organized in these four
different tabs. Go find what you need,’” Yamashita said.
The new app, the team hopes, will act as more of a personal coach than an impersonal shop.
This approach can be seen in three changes. In the previous iteration, drivers slid a switch to
take themselves online. To the design lead Bryant Jow, that felt impersonal, like the driver
was a cog who had to be turned on like a light switch. The switch was replaced with a
utton that simply says, “Go.”
The next change is more significant. Before, when a driver would open the app, they’d see a
map of the city with “surge” areas outlined in different warm colors. Drivers had to make a
pretty complex calculation about where the most profitable place to drive might be. Now,
Uber’s app will offer up a simple suggestion that doesn’t necessarily tell