OVERVIEW
Huddle is an autonomous ridesharing service for school kids. It uses prescheduled itineraries to safely pool nearby riders going to common destinations, reducing cost, decreasing traffic, and improving convenience.
TEAM
Solo project
TIMELINE
4 months
SKILLS
Service design, UX/UI, business modeling, branding, marketing, stakeholder interviewing, systems mapping
CONTEXT
MFA Products of Design, School of Visual Arts
The US Department of Energy says that cars average only 1.6 people per trip and sit parked over 95% of their lifespans. This waste causes downstream problems like traffic, pollution, and increased costs of living.
Meanwhile, for families with school kids, budget cuts, out-of-district charter schools, and overlapping schedules make transport a logistical nightmare.
Huddle is the evolution of the school bus, offering more flexibility with fewer costs.
Unlike school buses, which are costly, drive limited routes, and sit unused for long periods of time, Huddle licenses underutilized autonomous taxis and pools kids in nearby locations using pre-scheduled daily itineraries.
This service shuttles kids to school, after-school activities, and home without needing parents to drive them. Safety measures include ride-along chaperones, geolocation, and parental oversight.
Huddle’s secret sauce is in prescheduling pooled rides rather than waiting for single ride requests like Uber and Lyft. This allows the app to build safe and efficient carpools based on geographic proximity, age, familiarity, and destination.
I spoke with parents about their needs, wants, and strategies around shuttling multiple kids from school to activities and home while also working full time.
According to the US Census, the number of American schoolchildren is growing. Those kids are driven to school and extracurriculars in underutilized cars by parents who struggle to reconcile scheduling.
The US rideshare market has 51 million active users with a penetration rate of only 16%, and a current value of $18.4 billion per year. This tells us we're looking at an untapped, highly-valuable market.
I created personas for both parents and kids to understand my core users.
I identified 3 key user goals and framed them into tasks
I brainstormed 45 ideas based on my framing exercise.
I visited a grade school in California and shared my prototype with students.
I integrated user feedback and added new branding to create the final prototype.
Huddle is a brand that appeals to families without talking down to kids. It's trustworthy, clear, and friendly.
The Huddle wordmark reflects a clean, friendly face to the brand, while the name implies a sports huddle
–a kid-friendly metaphor about coming together for a greater purpose.
The colors are modern, clean, and simple–creating a sense of transparency and trust in the brand.
As a startup, Huddle's primary marketing goals would be to grow the user base and increase the rate of rides per week. This would be measured by new user activations and trips completed.
Our core users are working parents of school-age kids living in suburbs. From there, I defined several subgroups to begin A/B testing with.
The funnel is built on a mobile-first ad strategy and with parents in mind. We will measure drop-off rates at each stage to identify bottlenecks and A/B test improvements.
Convenience, cost, and empowerment are the 3 reasons a parent might use Huddle.
Ads highlight the product's value proposition and will be A/B tested on copy, creative, and placement. ROI over time will determine which marketing channel we allocate more spend to.
Cars are usually the most expensive purchase in someone’s life other than a house—and they’re depreciating assets often paid for with interest-charging loans. They carry only 1.6 people per trip on average, and sit parked over 95% of their lifespans.
Ride-pooling services like Huddle reimagine our relationship to vehicles and provide more sustainable, efficient, cost-effective models of transport.