Uber on Wednesday revamped its app with a simple design to make the user experience better and the app faster and smarter. The company has added new ‘Shortcuts’ feature as well. This is the first major update to the app since its last redesign in 2012.
The new redesigned Uber app is simple, cleaner and has an overhauled map design. According to the company, the new features will make the user experience better. Now when the app launches, it simply asks “Where to?”, instead of a couple of complicated options that it previously had. Comparing the ride cost among different cab types like Uber X, Uber Pool and Uber Black has been made user-friendly.
The app uses AI to learn from your routines and can predict ‘shortcuts’ for frequent riders. The app will also integrate calendar to automatically fetch addresses as ‘shortcuts’ for your meetings and appointments. These new features will save time of user in looking up for addresses or checking up on timings. Now, they can get moving with just one tap.
Since our last redesign in 2012, our app has become complicated and harder to navigate. To recapture the clean and simple aesthetic of the original Uber experience—without sacrificing the choice our riders now expect—we rebuilt a faster, smarter rider app completely from the ground up. We designed the new Uber app around you — and our core beliefs that time is a luxury and that the information you need should always be at your fingertips.
– Yuhki Yamashita, Senior Product Manager, Uber.
Uber will soon be introducing a new feature, called as ‘People are the new places’ that will allow you to set your destination to a person instead of a place. Users will need to sync their contacts with Uber app, and then type in the person’s name into the search bar. Once the other user shares the location, the app will pick it up automatically.
The redesigned Uber app is now available to iOS users and will be rolling out globally to Android users over the next several weeks.