Uber Just Redesigned Its App & Here’s Everything You Need to Know

Uber has completely redesigned its app with a focus on speed, simplicity and efficiency.

The reason for building it up from the ground up is that the app had become bloated with time. The company kept on adding features and as a result, user experience and security suffered. With the redesigned app, Uber is hoping to save time whether it’s when the app launches or the time a user spends in booking a ride.

Speaking about the problems in the current version of the app, Uber’s senior product manager Yukhi Yamashtia said, “We felt like we were being crushed by feature development.” He added, “We are literally running out of space.”

Update Overview

• Where To?

The app users are now greeted with the question, “Where to?”. The passenger just has to input the location of their destination such as home, work, or a friend’s address. The app is now much simpler and intuitive.

• Categories

The toggle at the bottom of the page contained options such as UberPool, UberX, Select, Black, SUV and Delivery. The options were jumbled together previously but are now divided in different categories.

Passengers can now find options such as UberX and UberPool under the “economy” category and to book lavish cars, they need to switch to the “premium” category.

• Suggestions

“It wasn’t particularly smart,” design director Didier Hilhorst says about the previous versions of the app. This is why Uber has gone a step further in ensuring they do things right this time around through machine learning. The application tracks your frequent destinations at different times. This will enable the Uber app to suggest destinations more smartly and at the right time. Such as, work destination in the morning, favorite pizza place you like at noon, gym in the evening and home when you get off from work.

• Price Estimation

Now Uber users do not have to wonder what their cab fare will be. The update also brings the price estimation of the route selected by the user. Depending on the traffic congestion and number of stops passenger wants to make, the cab fare will vary and users can analyze that before they take the cab by simply using the app to its fullest potential.

• People as Places

The new update also allows you to “ping” your friends. Given the friends share their location after the ping, your route will be set to where they currently are. Uber define this as “people as places” feature. It is integrated in the update as more of an experiment. The Uber officials say that it will be refined in the future.

Privacy Concerns

The new update has also raised a few eyebrows over security. Personal information is required to be filled in by the users and the app will have access to address books as well as calendars.

However, Uber claim that, “We do not expect privacy objections because users will have to agree to allow the app to scan their calendars and address books and people whose locations are being sought through the new address-book feature will be able to decide whether they want to share the information.”