September signals a return.
A return of people from their holidays, a return of kids to school and the return of old routines and habits. For some commuters, this allows people to get back into sharing their rides with their friends and neighbors.
For others, it’s staring at the quirky bumper stickers of the traffic snaking down the freeway.
So Carma is returning to the App and Play Stores with something fresh for all our users, both old and new.
Carma V6
Codenamed “Zelda”, Carma 6.0 was a chance to incorporate feedback into the app. One refrain we have heard from the last version was that people like to make quick adjustments to their journeys.
Trip Editing
In V5, there was a few steps to allow you to pop into your trips and make the necessary adjustments.
V6 presents you with your next two trips right on the home screen.
So if you are running 5 mins late or just want to say that you’re held up for today, you can do that with two clicks. Real easy.
Tabs
Yoga is a great way to get flexibility but we didn’t want people to be practicing finger yoga reaching for our controls.
We moved the navigation to a bottom bar to allow you to easily reach any part of the app without having to strain your thumb.
Another benefit is that while on a trip, you can move to other parts of the app (riders only please, drivers, keep those eyes on the road) and send messages or view profiles.
We’ll always show you when a ride is in progress. So you’ll know to end the trip when it’s finished, even if you’re on another screen.
We looked at the normal carpooling activity of our users. 90% of the time, we noticed that you tend to travel with the same small group of 4-5 people. Often, you’ll be carpooling with a member of your family. Charging family members to carpool can lead to strained dinner conversations (we know because we tested it. RIP Greg!) so we’ve got a favorites section that allows you to add your favorite carpoolers, and lets you carpool free of charge.
Still you’re saying to yourself, something looks different. Why yes, thank you for noticing. V6 wasn’t neglected, we decided to refresh the app with a light color scheme to aid legibility and allow more breathing room for elements.
It’s no fun to drive alone, so we also added sharing options to spread the word about your commute to your social networks. Tweet, like, share – add your friends to your carpool network.
So with the addition of improved performance, easy trip editing, revised navigation, new user interface and favorites screen improvements, you would guess that a small glass of wine would be merited. But we’ve still got it corked since there’s so much more to come in terms of improving the app.
But what of the future?
Our goal is to be ignored by the vast majority of users. If you have to ‘use’ our app more than you use Facebook, we’ve failed.
How do we sit more in the background for you? How do we fit seamlessly in to your life? How do you get on with your day knowing that we’ve got you a trip home, our app is registering the trip details, arranging payment between driver and rider without fuss, and helping you arrange the trip for the following morning? All with the minimum intrusion into your life. You don’t have to think about getting into your car and turning the key. Using Carma should be the same.
All of these are in development and will be coming to your iPhone/Android in the near future.