How Embrace improved an international ride hailing app’s user experience

The app aims to challenge conventional ride-hailing norms by providing a more innovative and  seamless user experience. For the team, that means innovation through accessibility. 

They exemplify this through their commitment to safety and the implementation of aspects like their fixed pay feature. This guarantees a driver’s income in cities with lower demand. Additionally, the team has introduced features for drivers and passengers who are deaf or hard of hearing. 

Maintaining innovative user experiences, as the team discovered, is far from easy. Without the right tooling, meeting user expectations was difficult and presented a number of challenges, including:

The team struggled to ensure that their latest releases were optimized and free of critical issues, especially when it comes to networking issues. Previous tools lacked the network-monitoring capabilities necessary to keep track of key performance indicators and failure rates.

The team noticed they struggled to keep drivers active on their app, but previous tools couldn’t provide visibility into the root cause of the problem. As a result, they couldn’t analyze or track key user flows, and were left unaware of an issue that prevented their drivers from accepting new rides nearly 57% of the time.

When users attempted to refresh their app, a critical tokenization error would occur, leading most users to log out or abandon the app altogether. Previous tooling did nothing to identify this issue, which led to a time and resource intensive investigation by engineers who could not identify the root cause.

In response to these challenges, the team turned to Embrace to enhance their mobile data and monitoring capabilities. Embrace provided the app with the tools they needed to deploy seamless releases, eliminate driver-acceptance errors, and resolve user tokenization issues. 

Users are inundated with prompts to constantly update their apps and software. But when an update does little to improve the user experience — or negatively impact it, instead — it can lead to serious user frustration.

For the Senior Mobile Engineer, Embrace is a valuable tool.

“We use Embrace to ensure that our latest release is healthy and there are no critical problems,” notes the Senior Mobile Engineer.

The app releases a new update to 5% of their userbase and then uses Embrace to monitor the release for critical issues within the first 24 hours. After that point, assuming the release meets their expectations, the app then releases the new update, incrementally, to the rest of their user base.

One particular release highlighted the value of Embrace’s capabilities. 

The team faced a critical issue due to a null value input in a crucial field on the client side, leading to a JSON parsing crash. This situation underscored the necessity of robust network monitoring, a key feature utilized by the team, according to the Android Team Lead. 

“Network monitoring is a pivotal part of our toolkit. It enables us to track vital statistics and failure rates, often allowing us to pinpoint issues almost instantaneously,” the Android Team Lead said.

The incident led to a deeper analysis of network data via Embrace, enabling the team to swiftly detect and rectify an API-related error. This rapid response not only resolved the immediate issue but also reduced user friction significantly. 

Consequently, reviewing Embrace data has become an integral part of the release protocol, ensuring each update enhances the user experience while maintaining app stability.

The team has two users in their app — drivers and passengers. While it’s important to ensure that their passengers have safe, quality experiences, it’s also important for the team to ensure that their drivers can use the app seamlessly.

A particularly critical challenge they faced came from the driver’s side of the app. 

In a normal user flow, drivers accept rides, carry them out, and then once their passengers reach their destination, they are redirected to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) page where they can view their completed rides, give and receive ratings, and see the money they’ve earned. When the flow operates as designed, drivers are then able to go back to the main navigation page (from the NPS page) and coordinate further rides. 

And while the NPS page is important for drivers, what’s arguably more important is that drivers can get back to the main navigation and continue to book new rides.

With Embrace, the team was able to uncover a critical issue that effectively trapped drivers on the NPS page, which directly led to a decrease in the number of daily rides administered — a  critical issue which quickly became one of the highest-priorities as almost all daily active users across Android and iOS were impacted by the problem

Monitoring driver navigation times to the NPS page revealed a significant increase from the usual 3 seconds to 7 seconds. This data, captured through Embrace’s User Session Insights, indicated to their engineering team that a recent modification in the product design might be the cause.

With these insights, the engineering team communicated the issue to the product team. This led to a collaborative effort with the design team to improve the page’s user experience. 

The refined UX now includes an option for drivers to bypass the NPS page, directly accessing the main navigation page post-ride. Additionally, if a driver spends more than 10 seconds on the NPS page, it automatically closes. 

These changes resulted in a reduction of navigation time back to 3 seconds and an increase in daily-ride frequency.

“Embrace revolutionized our approach to troubleshooting user issues,” the Android Team Lead said. “Before Embrace, tools like User Session Insights were unfamiliar to us. Now, they are indispensable for monitoring key metrics that are crucial to our user experience.”

In the realm of user experience, a crucial challenge emerged, centering around token expiration. When users’ tokens expired, the conventional approach required them to refresh the app and retrieve a new token from the server. However, users encountered insurmountable obstacles while attempting to refresh and obtain the necessary new token.

The repercussions were substantial as user frustration escalated, leading some users to log out, or, worse, abandon the application altogether. A surge in customer support tickets stemming from this issue underscored the gravity of the problem.

The team worked to uncover the root cause by diving into their users’ session data, discovering a pattern: The glitch was linked to a specific page where the API failed to tokenize, triggering this issue for users. 

Armed with this information, the team worked to resolve this tokenization glitch and restore the app’s functionality.

“We’re able to find critical user issues in Embrace that we were unable to find using previous analytics tools,” the Android Team Lead said.

The app’s mobile engineering team is unwavering in their commitment to crafting  intelligent, innovative, customer-oriented experiences. 

Their ambitious mission is to use technology to profoundly improve the quality of life in the EMEA. This commitment to transforming the travel experience is what led them to partner with Embrace. 

Our data-driven tools equip the team with valuable insights, supporting their goal to consistently offer high-quality user experiences. With the aid of Embrace’s data, the app is able to expand its capabilities, enhance user engagement, and explore new avenues for improving mobile interactions.

Learn how Embrace can help you reach your mobile app goals like this team, by requesting a demo today.