Little Bang! Helps Rideshare App Move Forward
UC Davis Students, Alum Win Poster Competition Award
Blog by Team Hitcher
Hitcher is a community-oriented ridesharing app that helps connect city dwellers and local communities to coordinate transportation for day-to-day errands and commutes.
We are so thankful for the opportunity to participate in the Little Bang! Poster Competition. Through research, conducting interviews, and receiving critiques from mentors, we were able to learn, create and reflect—and ultimately developed a successful Little Bang! submission.
Our group was a part of an on-campus research opportunity facilitated by Jean Menezes, focused on researching the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We decided to delve deeper into the goal of sustainable cities, where we found that most residents of heavily populated cities had little to no access to transportation. Through interviews/user feedback, careful analysis of statistics, and research on alternative transportation options, we created Hitcher.
We decided that a poster would help visually and verbally communicate our ideas of how Hitcher could benefit our target market and show comparisons supporting why our app is better than most pay-to-ride apps like Uber, Lift, Waze, etc. The poster also helped us to demonstrate an understanding of how a prototype version of our app would work.
In preparing to compete in the second Little Bang! competition in February 2021, we reflected on the valuable feedback we received from the judges and other participants on our business idea. The feedback helped us to consider the sustainability, target audience, supply and demand, and the overall viability of the business idea for Hitcher. We’ve made significant changes to the target market and the overarching problem and solution statement, primarily shifting the target market to a younger demographic consisting of college students and focusing on designing a platform for coordinating carpools in a convenient, accessible and safe environment as an alternative to other methods of arranging carpools (e.g., through a Facebook rideshare group).
To better develop our business idea, we hope to conduct more user interviews with our new target audience: inner-city students. To get the most feedback possible, we are creating a survey that will collect more quantitative data by the end of December. This will allow us to adapt our ideas towards true user needs. Connecting with potential users and conducting user research through online methods is the best we can do during these unprecedented times. Questions will focus on user needs and their priorities when it comes to ride share platforms. We will also ask about their views on safety and comfortability in regards to ride sharing. We hope to gain a better understanding of the average college student’s points of concern when finding reliable transportation by car.
Additionally, having a mentor is an important part of our ideation and design process and allows us to have a different perspective and receive critique on our work. Fortunately, as participants in the research opportunity facilitated by Jean Menezes, we have a great mentor at our fingertips. We greatly value the critiques we have received and hope to further discuss how our project is progressing the research. In addition, we want to connect with one of the judges as a follow up to the Little Bang! This will help us better understand the feedback we received during the presentation night and build our idea into a more structured plan.
We learned a lot participating in the Little Bang! As our team consists of mostly design majors, we were able to take away a lot more knowledge on how to better develop the business aspect of our idea.
Through critiques from judges and other viewers, we gained insight on how we can create a better flow for our poster. We learned that including more diagrams and other visuals and using type hierarchy to highlight the most important information could take our poster up a notch. In addition, the question and answer session helped us find our weak points. For upcoming rounds, we plan on thinking through possible questions that may come up at the event and potentially rehearsing a practice round with a judge.
Meet the Hitcher Team
Marie Navarro: Third-year student: industrial and product design
Adetayo Oke: B.S. 2020: industrial and product design
Kristy Shiota: Fifth-year student: graphic design major, animal science minor
Antonia Wu: Third-year student: double major in design and cognitive science