Hack Day — The Final Push

End of quarter is always a busy time for tech teams and indeed companies as a whole, as everyone pushes to get those last projects finished and those last quarterly objectives completed.

This month we decided to use the hack day as an opportunity to push those last projects over the finish line. Here are the projects we worked on:

Profile completion

This mini project had been in the backlog for some time but after some focus groups and discussions with the community team it was finally prioritised as it was confusing for members and resulted in Hiyacar losing potential owners and drivers.

Before drivers can be on-boarded the community team require a basic set of data including name, contact details and licence information. What we found was that it wasn’t clear what information was still required and this took up the community team’s time in resolving and meant unnecessary frustration for members keen to hire a car.

Bruno came up with some fantabulous designs to show the profile completion status and Bilal and Ariane developed the new widget and screens in the Android and iOS apps:

Users now have the ability to click this banner and be presented with exactly what they still have to complete.

When they have completed all the bits and bobs they are ready to hire a car as our in house male model demonstrates in this next shot.

We will be monitoring the success of this new functionality and hope that it provides users with a nice easy journey from downloading the app to getting their first hiya!

Extensions

Around 1 day per week of the community team’s time was spent extending bookings for members, which previously could only be done by a driver agreeing to extend with the owner, and then contacting our community team, who would create the extension. This can take anything from 5 minutes to days if members haven’t previously arranged the extension with the owner or if they do not have the funds in their bank account.

This was identified by Bilal at the beginning of this quarter during a focus group with the community team which lead to discussions with Marc on how this could be done. During this quarter Marc developed our API to facilitate the creation of extensions and Bilal and Adriane built the screens and included the extension requests to the API within the Android and iOS apps. And this final hack day provided that extra bit of quiet time to get this finished.

The user can see how long is left for their current booking and add a new drop off:

Which will provide them with a the cost of the extension:

DVLA automation

Another massive hog of the community team’s time is manually performing licence checks for new drivers. When I asked Alessandra about how much time her and Marcella spend on this, she said they spend about 3 days each per week on licence checks!

This requires members to leave our site, obtain a check code from the DVLA website that they then enter into our site during the registration process which then allows us to perform a licence check. Members often need a lot of support with this and a lot of time is spent in live chat and talking people through the process.

We’re automating this whole step to make it as easy as possible for our members. This is in the testing phase at the moment — watch this space!

Summary

With these key updates either live or about to be live we hope it will reduce the strain on our community team meaning they can concentrate more time on other areas and provide our members with even more of a kick ass customer service then they already do.

Our members are the most important part of the Hiyacar community so we hope the functionality that we have delivered will improve their experience and solidify our position as the leading p2p car-sharing service in London.

More hack days soon!

Greg Okninski

Greg Okninski

Full-stack Developer at Hiyacar

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