Adding a new feature to an existing app — WAZE
One might think that apps are finished products when we use them, but there’s always a myriad of possibilities to make them better. Such is my exercise of adding a feature to the mobile app Waze in which I was given a possible feature to add to Waze and my job was to identify if it was a viable addition, and if it wasn’t, proposing another feature that could be added.
Waze, as many of you know, is a navigation app used by roughly 130 million people each month, that is designed to give the users the quickest pathway to a destination when they’re driving. It will also display several different alerts while you’re driving, such as road hazards, closed streets, police, potholes, etc.
User research
This information that Waze presents can be seen on screen (bad while you’re driving!) or heard through your phone’s speaker system or your car’s if you have your phone connected. However, after conducting a research consisting of 50 people, I found that only 44% of them drive with their audio cues/notifications on. From the research we could also identify that women have a higher tendency to have them on, accounting for 76% of the users who drive with audio cues.
After conducting further research by interviewing users of the app, I found that those who drive with notifications off do so because the app gives way too much information that the user does not need to hear at all times and that it interrupts both music and conversations happening in their cars. This is problematic since there’s only 3 possible available modes to listen to those notifications: on, off and alerts only.
The on option will give you every piece of information that app has to offer, alerts only will limit the clutter but still give a ton of information and off is simply no notifications whatsoever. The users are not given a lot of room for customizing their preferences, which leads a lot of people to turn their notifications off entirely.
Another problem that this brings forward is the fact that users deciding to keep their audio cues off means more distracted people driving. The users interviewed for this project stated that they try to check their route before leaving, but they were concerned about the distractions the app may cause if they have to constantly see the screen for directions.
There are also several important pieces of information missing from the app: information about parking was found to be important by the users and there are no options to display it. Users also have a hard time reaching the audio options on the app, especially if they’re already on the move and want to change the information they receive.
With this information, I designed a User Persona which will help us determine who we are designing for and make decisions based on the specific user. The following picture is a simplified version of that User Persona:
Problem definition
How could we give our users the chance to choose what kind of information they want to receive and how do we minimize distractions?
My hypothesis would be that adding a feature that allows our users to filter out the information they want to receive and the moments in which they want to receive it, we’ll minimize distractions and we’ll be giving our users more useful information for their daily travels.
With this, our main issue is how can we incentivize our users to turn on their audio cues and how can we allow them to choose the information they want to receive.
Proposed solution
For our solution, two things would be needed: a shortcut option that goes directly to your audio settings from the main screen and a modification for the same audio settings. We would need to add a fourth option so our audio options would be: on/off/alerts/customizable.
With the customizable option, you would be able to select specifically what audio cues you want to receive and they’d be contained in categories to make it easier to browse them.
Prototype
By adding the shortcut option, we’re giving users the opportunity to do quick tweaks to their audio cues preferences. This allows them to adjust rapidly at a stop light and receive the information they need.
Categories were also added to give the user a better understanding of the information they are going to receive.
Finally, making the preferences toggeable allows the user to do quick adjustments without making them stare at the screen for too long.
Next Steps
Iteration is always important which is why the next step is conducting usability tests and evaluating if the users find the addition of this feature useful or if it requires further development to be integrated into the application.
