Amping up the experience with seat selection

We want to allow users to select the seat during their booking process.

What is Cityflo?

Cityflo is an app based bus commute service trying to solve the problem of a substandard daily commute across India's metros by providing a high-quality solution that's innovative and simple. Our Benz AC buses have led to professionals giving up their cars to travel to work.

Cityflo users are primarily professional white-collar employees who work at companies located in corporate hubs such as BKC, Lower Parel, Colaba, Andheri E., Goregaon, Powai. Cityflo is targeted towards users who previously drove to work and expect high-quality service levels.

Let's set some context -

In our buses, pre-covid, the seating arrangement is on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis, passengers who board the bus at early stops (Arcadia Circle) get their preferred seats.

The ones who board at later stops (Mulund MHADA), have to pick from only those seats that were unwanted by the others, which were not comfortable.

The preferred & comfortable seats which get filled first were usually the window seats, especially those in the first few rows.

In-bus rules:

2 seats at the front of the bus are reserved for female passengers, senior citizens, pregnant ladies, or someone with some physical discomfort.

In our buses, pre-covid, the seating arrangement is on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis, passengers who board the bus at early stops (Arcadia Circle) get their preferred seats.

The ones who board at later stops (Mulund MHADA), have to pick from only those seats that were unwanted by the others, which were not comfortable.

The preferred & comfortable seats which get filled first were usually the window seats, especially those in the first few rows.

In-bus rules:

2 seats at the front of the bus are reserved for female passengers, senior citizens, pregnant ladies, or someone with some physical discomfort.

In our buses, pre-covid, the seating arrangement is on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis, passengers who board the bus at early stops (Arcadia Circle) get their preferred seats.

The ones who board at later stops (Mulund MHADA), have to pick from only those seats that were unwanted by the others, which were not comfortable.

The preferred & comfortable seats which get filled first were usually the window seats, especially those in the first few rows.

In-bus rules:

2 seats at the front of the bus are reserved for female passengers, senior citizens, pregnant ladies, or someone with some physical discomfort.

The problem, you ask?

Not having allocated seats leads to various issues on the bus which leads to a poor customer experience. Some of the major problems we know -

Passengers who get on from the last few pick-ups stops always get uncomfortable seats, even if they were regular travellers/subscription users, feedback we've heard often
With the new seating arrangement & reserved double-seats due to Covid regulations, and there being no allocated seats, we were seeing passengers shift seats leading to confusion & a bad user experience
The driver has to be more vigilant about the seating arrangement and often has to stop the bus in the middle of the road to check the pass and make sure our passengers sit on the right seats. This often leads to delays.
Another important reason of doing this was to improve the customer experience

We did some talking & reading…

The majority of the calls/tickets we receive were from the passengers who board the bus at the later stops. The comments were:

I had to sit at the end of the bus as there were no front seats available
If there’s a senior citizen & a pregnant lady on the bus, they occupy the reserved seats and someone boarding at the later stops has to settle for the less comfortable ones.
Female passengers sometimes have concerns sitting next to a male passenger. This is not from the safety point of view, but just about comfort/personal space, as the current space between seats is not enough (and sometimes males tend to occupy more space than women).

This feedback was given mostly by our regular/subscription users who often travel with Cityflo

What were we trying to solve?

As a user (who gets on from stops towards the end of the route), I want to be able to select my seat so that I can commute on a comfortable seat, all of which are usually occupied by the time I board
As a user (who gets on from stops towards the end of the route), I want the same privilege as a user who boards from the start of the route, since I am paying the same amount for the service but am getting a less comfortable commute

☝🏻

Buses are good, bus drivers are professional. I am giving 2 stars as my genuine problem is unheard by competent authority of Cityflo. I commute from Nerul to BKC. The bus starts from Kharghar. The person who books ride at last minute at Kharghar have choice to seat on front seat and the person at Nerul who had booked ride before him or a pass holder have to seat on last seats. That's why people from CBD Belapur avoid Cityflo. Cityflo should allow us to book our choice seat.

As a frequent user, I want to be able to take the same seat on the same bus every day - making it my personal space
As a user, I want to be able to reserve 2 seats for myself so that I can maintain social distancing during my commute
As a user (maybe a senior citizen), I want to be able to select a seat where I feel the least turbulence while traveling as I have a back issue that can get aggravate

☝🏻

Customer is pregnant and has complained several times that there are no placards of priority seating and for pregnant ladies and hence has to sit on the last seat which is bumpy.

As a user, I want to be able to select a seat that is at the front (& has more leg space) of the bus since I am pregnant and do not prefer walking to the back of the bus

Some fairly easy (I thought so ?!) but important decisions had to be taken -

What's the right way to number the seats? & how would the Seat map look to the users?

💡

Humans are most comfortable when they are in control of their decisions. Allowing users to select the seat they want to sit on will provide them more control of their daily travel, which will essentially improve their ride experience.

What was on our plate?

Teamed up with PM for the following tasks,

To have a user flow in place for both new and existing users. For new users, ask their choice of seat preference (single/double) and show seat map to reflect their decision
An easier way to implement double seating without impacting business
Incorporating Seat number into existing UI with limited changes to the design

The user flow-

How it'll look for Ajinkya now that he goes and selects a seat for himself. Here's the prototype that was tested internally, to play along.

What was the impact?

Support tickets reduced, we saw a significant dip in the number of tickets that were raised after the launch of this feature
Users, like Ajinkya & Archana, got to experience the same privilege. In turn improving the overall customer experience. PS: We saw a pattern wherein the subscription users booked their seats weeks in advance just to get their favourite one. People were literally holding on to their seats! :D
Peace of mind for the drivers, the intention was to improve users' part of the experience but ripple effect affected our important stakeholders equally.