Ryde — Profile System Redesign
Ryde is a carpooling app built for college students. Thousands of Cal Poly SLO students use it to share rides home for breaks, weekends, and holidays. As part of Cal Poly's Iter8 design consultancy, I joined a 7-person team hired by Ryde to redesign their user profile experience over 8 weeks.
A profile redesign built around one question: why don't users trust each other?
We worked directly with Ryde's founders in weekly standups, conducted our own focus groups with real users, and synthesized research Ryde had already gathered. The result was Profile 2.0, a trust-first redesign that gave riders and drivers the information, signals, and tools to feel confident sharing a car with a stranger.
Problem
Pain Point 01
Safety anxiety — especially for women
Female riders went off-platform to locate mutual connections before a ride. One participant described going to social media "to get a better idea and feel more secure." The profile wasn't doing the job that trust requires.
Pain Point 02
The review system suppressed honesty
After hours in a car together, leaving a negative review felt like betrayal. No anonymous option. No text field. No driver response. Shallow star ratings that caught nothing, especially real safety issues.
Pain Point 03
Critical information didn't exist
Students wanted to know luggage capacity, planned stops, and car rules. None of that existed. Wanting basic driver info scored a mean of 4.29/5 with a std deviation of 0.90.
Approach
Ryde shared their existing data: 20 in-depth interviews and a 382-person survey. We then ran our own focus group with three current users: a power driver with 30+ trips, a frequent out-of-state rider, and a top-rated transfer student driver.
What the focus group changed
HMW Statements
User Flow
Making honesty feel safe
This was the hardest problem on the project. Ryde needed honest reviews for safety. But users were suppressing them. The social bond formed during a shared trip made criticism feel personal.
The tension: Mandatory public reviews made social pressure worse. My first approach, a public-only system with required text, meant users would either skip it or write something vague. Public accountability was the exact dynamic suppressing honesty.
"We want [reviews] to be a fun way for people to share positive experience. But they should also be a way for frustrated users to make their voice heard... an optional text-based review should be included, with an anonymous option if selected." — Ryde Co-founder 1 (client email)
That email reframed the goal: not to make reviews easier — but to make honesty feel safe.
Star rating + optional text field — structured for Ryde's support team, open enough for nuance
Anonymous toggle— breaks the social pressure loop without removing accountability
Driver response feature— lets recipients add context, Emily specifically requested this
Badge integration— positive review patterns surface as achievements, not just scores
ID Tags: personality over forms
Riders and drivers wanted compatibility signals such asmusic taste, chattiness, car vibe, stop willingness. But a long profile questionnaire feels like a job application. Tags let users express personality in a low-effort, scannable format without writing a bio.
Why not a bio? Freeform bios have completion rates near zero in apps with optional fields. Tags are constrained, fast, and expressive and they feed the matching algorithm without cognitive load.
When we presented this in standup, the Ryde team confirmed users in their own research had been excited about it. We kept the vocabulary flexible and suggested tags plus write-your-own to avoid making it feel prescribed.
Adventure Gallery: from utility to identity
Ryde profiles were purely functional. There was no personality, no reason to return after a ride was booked. Ryde's founders wanted users engaged between trips, not just during booking.
The Adventure Gallery let users post photos and videos from their rides: road trips, scenic stops, carpooling moments. Inspired by Airbnb's approach to user-generated content, we designed it to feel editorial rather than social feed: photos with captions, organized by trip. One constraint deliberately scoped out: live maps and real-time location which was validated in research but deprioritized by Ryde as a later engineering phase.
Badges: turning data into trust signals
Ryde was already collecting rich data: miles traveled, rides completed, CO2 saved, money saved, but none of it appeared on profiles. A driver with 30 completed trips looked identical to someone with zero.
"They're collecting stats — showcase them." — Ryde Co-founder 2 (client standup)
Badges surface those stats as earnable achievements which acts as trust signals for riders, motivation for drivers. Badge taxonomy shaped directly by client standups: alumni badges that expire post-graduation, locked badges that show what you're working toward, event-specific badges tied to Ryde community moments.
Process
Solution
