Hey Bheem,
This being the first in our past where I am trying to parse a solution to an entire sector and stake my vote to a probable strategy that could achieve it. Luckily I didn’t have to find something innovative, we already had the basics covered, just re-engineered them and presented it with little context.
Everyone has suddenly decided that they don’t like being called the disruptor anymore. Rather they are out there to help the customers find synergy. The aggregators are trying to launch multiple channels of services like bus and metro ticketing, self-drive, etc. But why the sudden change in language and rhetoric that these companies are preaching.
Since our previous post, Ola has decided to launch ride-sharing as well. As if they had fewer options to offer in their already cluttered app. They have launched it in Bangalore and now looking to slowly but surely expand to the other southern metropolitan cities soon.
In the previous post, I wrote about why these companies are trying to build walled gardens and how it has faulted so far. In this post, I would like to cover a probable solution that we could co-opt for solving the problem of urban commuting.
Interoperability
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.
Today we are locked into walled gardens and the number one proponent of this strategy is Apple. Being the most valued company in the world also helps to propagate this concept as being the only viable option for the way forward. But the internet economy was not built in the walled garden manner.
Interoperability has been the keen proponent that led to the knowledge economy we are living at the moment. Even apple re-engineered its iWork suite ( Microsoft office alternate ) to make its products work with word, excel and ppt formats. This saved the company from complete annihilation as a personal computer OS back in the 2000s.
The internet was developed with open protocols that let anyone and everyone to come on board and contribute to the code straight away. Lot on the internet still runs on those same old open protocols.
One such resurgent protocol is RSS, the default protocol that podcasts use for distribution. Podcasts which have seen a recent uptick in listenership across the globe. One more such protocol is Email, many apps have come and gone. Many have staked to be email killers and yet all of them are secondary to email. Mail is also being used as a medium of engagement now thanks to the resurgence of mediums like newsletters.
One such field where interoperability could play a pivotal role is urban commuting. As I mentioned what Dhara of Uber, and now Bhavesh of Ola are planning to do in two different geographies is to offer multiple modes of offering and try to use their brand affinity to cater to every customer.
Being a designer and product manager, there are few things we learn in our line of work, implementing this strategy is termed as fool’s errand. It is next to impossible to make your product work for everyone, we rather pick a cohort of target customers and try to create a product for them.
Pivot to Interoperability
In the urban commuting space, you can also look at the new trends such as micro-mobility that is gaining traction. So, what is micro-mobility?
Horace Dediu who runs a Micromibility conference explains it best :
Micromobility should be defined around what is singular about its purpose: moving a human being. It’s defined first and foremost as personal mobility whose utility is to move its occupant. Its purpose is thus to offer maximum freedom of mobility and its minimalism is to do so in the least impactful way. Its minimalism means it needs to leave no trace of itself and ask the least for itself.
To understand more about the definition, you can check out the entire post over here.
It is not useful in denying or dismissing the work that the first set of urban mobility aggregators did to upgrade the way we use the taxi network. Using a new medium, mobile phone, they envisioned and unleashed a new way of hailing a cab and utilising the cab (Pooling). It hurt local municipalities and public transportation organisations. They weren’t ready to compete with the cash-rich and market share hungry aggregators. This led to an increased market share of ride-hailing operators and a strain on the revenues of public service providers.
This leads to a disturbing trends where public transportation not being resourceful for the public to be considered good enough for governments to fund. This can be credited to growth in private ownership of vehicles, both 2 and 4 wheelers, or in the growth of the Urban mobility solutions like ride-hailing services.
Our aggregators are trying to provide all sorts of options in their apps but the customer experience cannot be great and hassle-free because they are trying to accommodate many things to many people which only results in average experiences. This approach though satisfies the jobs to be done framework of aggregators but fails fatly in the user experience side. User experience matters because co-opting people to new ways of commuting require handholding or else you have to resort to discounting which leads to the wildfires in our Urban jungles.
Rather, it will be a better alternative to have all these companies opt the Interoperability as a core tenet of their products right from the start.
Interoperability in Urban Commuting: Few Possibilities
The main purpose of this strategy to have a unique value proposition of your product offering yet not locking in the customers to your service.
In order to make this work, we need to focus on a few key factors on which the Urban commuting is built :
Payments: We already have payment gateways that are easy to incorporate for any company to begin in their journey. But all the Urban commuting companies use this dark pattern of rewarding you in credits in the app. This is to cut their overhead of unsuccessful or failed trips. This should not be permitted or even if it is, it should be easily transferred to any other app where the credit equates the monetary unit of currency in the country.
Mapping: Mapping services from Google drive the entire urban commuting companies. The entry for new companies in urban commuting is cost-intensive because to build fast they use google’s map services. This requires the need for huge investment as google is not cheap, and unfortunately there aren’t any affordable and good alternates to it. We should look to build an open sourced single purpose mapping solution which creates an economy in itself for the urban commuting companies to derive a channel of revenue. Information is poured into the system and for which each company is rewarded. The company using the service in its applications will pay the service. This will create a healthy ecosystem of all companies contributing and extracting value which is aligned to the same needs rather than an advertising company running your core stack.
Profile: In Every app you build a profile of favourite locations, most used routes and possible use times for your commuting needs. This is valuable information for any commuting company to have on you and can also be used to monetise at a later date. This data should reside with the customer for them to take across all the service providers so as to have the best option available to them basing on the need, this ensures agency and no lock-in, in short, enhancing freedom of the customers without hurting the experience.
Trip Handoff: I started this post with the premise of urban commuting companies trying to offer all sorts of services within its app. What if you could do the same thing without being locked into the one single service? This is exactly what we would like to achieve with trip handoff. Your trip or journey is nothing but bits of information for an app handling it if the app can handoff this information to the next service you picked in a proper way. You have your trip but the service providers change based on the journey of your trip. The trip information should be easily handed off to the next service provider of the commute like how telecom towers hand-off your call between towers without the call getting interrupted.
I am not sure if this a pipe dream of mine or companies that are in this sector will even consider this option. The reality is that at the moment I have no skin in the game for me to vouch for this strategy. Still, I strongly believe that this is the only way that urban commuting as a sector can have profitable, innovative and sustainable companies to cater to all of our needs.
Regards,
Vivek
The Duologue is an effort by Vivek and Bheem to have a dialogue about varying topics.
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