There's noting in it that they haven't heard before so I doubt they'll want to spend much, if any, time discussing any of it, erm. Anywaysanall, I've finalised my submission (as below) with a couple of additions and minor amendments to that previously posted, thanks to you and others for jogging my memory of certain issues.
Discounts:
Drivers who engage with support, providing feedback, are told they aren’t allowed charge the booking fee in accordance with the fare card but the T&Cs communicated to drivers in general suggest drivers are allowed charge full fare as per local tariffs. The latter is further supported by the blog post at
http://help.mytaxi.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2237172-fare-estimate-and-surcharges which states that “The taxi fare rates, including any extra charges or surcharges, are determined by local taxi regulations in the cities and regions where mytaxi operates”.
Obviously it makes no sense for a driver to cover discounted work at peak times, particularly on a commission basis. On the face of it, there’s no justification for offering discounts in the current economic climate and mytaxi is the only Dublin taxi firm with such a policy. This could be viewed as an abuse of it’s dominant position in the PPJ market and seems to contradict its complaining that it cannot cover current demand.
Priority Driver - Schemes of this nature are often viewed as divide and conquer tactics. Hence they, arguably, alienate as many (potential) drivers as they inspire.
Hospitality jobs - The relevant banner doesn’t always display on the offer screen. An opt out facility (as previously available with Hail0) is desirable.
Airport pick ups - Passengers aren’t being directed to the pick up points advised at
https://ie.mytaxi.com/DublinAirportPickup and the locations advised suffer from significant accessibility restrictions.
Driver App (Android):
General - Client side programming is poor at best resulting in unnecessary delays in the User Interface updating as it waits for irrelevant responses from the server. Effects include:
- delays in displaying the appropriate action button (Go Free/Go Busy/Etc) when the app is called from background to foreground.
- delays in silencing the audio offer alert and displaying the job or lack thereof when the accept or reject button is pressed.
- delays in loading fare input screen.
- unnecessary inputs and delays in fare input process.
Users don’t need to watch and wait for interactions between the app and the server. Hail0’s UI understood that which is undoubtedly why the vast majority of drivers view the mytaxi app as a poor man’s Hail0. Using the fare input as an example, with Hail0 I entered the fare pressed a button to confirm and the app immediately told me I was free whereas mytaxi feels a need to tell me that it’s processing what I entered and eventually ask me to press OK when it’s done before telling me I’m free. As a user I don’t need to know what it’s doing and I don’t care how long or how many attempts it takes to process the fare. My bit is done when the fare is entered.
Non existent jobs - Whatever way jobs are dispatched seems to result in countless offers that don’t materialise in jobs if accepted. As a driver gets used to the accept button doing nothing other than displaying a bouncing car for a short time he loses interest and certainly won’t refuse a street hail during the time it takes the app to decide whether to give him the job or not. I appreciate that offering jobs to several drivers at a time is designed to improve efficiency for passengers and/or encourage drivers to accept faster, perhaps without thinking about the cost/benefit implications. However, one of the things that makes Uber’s driver app infinitely better than mytaxi’s is the fact that all job offers materialise in jobs if accepted within the allotted time.
Distance to jobs - it seems that the mytaxi app aims to display the driving distance but reverts to straight line distance if it’s unable to ascertain driving distance. On the face of it driving distance provides better information but Hail0 used straight line distance which resulted in all jobs appearing to be further away when drivers switched to mytaxi. This undoubtedly contributed to problems riders reported on (social) media during rebranding. Interestingly, a colleague who highlighted the precise cause of this issue was told by support not to waste it’s time! Obviously, the different methodologies cause some confusion among drivers in setting their radius sliders.
Mapping - Customer location seems less reliable than was the case on Hail0. The navigate facility was a useful addition but the button is too big and in the wrong place as it frequently covers the pick up flag. The map zooming in as the driver approaches the job is a vast improvement from the Hail0 app but it’s not perfect as it often over-zooms leaving the pick up flag off the displayed area. The (blue line) route doesn’t always display. It tends to fail to load for several consecutive jobs at a time suggesting that Google’s flood limits are being hit.
Navigation - The app passes latitude and longitude to the Google Navigation app. Most of the time that works well but occasionally the results are poor e.g. if the coordinates relate to the back of a house it might navigate to the road behind the address. Passing the Eircode or text address where available would work better.
Tolls - The facility to enter tolls at the fare input stage has improved the process but why not have the figure automatically appear, perhaps in editable form. There’s only a handful of toll roads in Ireland so it wouldn’t take a whole lot of time/effort to geofence them. Uber does it!
Tips - Ought to be itemised in the same way as tolls and excluded from commission charges.
Destinations - Displaying job destinations on the offer screen could increase acceptance rates and would increase commission revenue as good jobs would be unlikely to be left uncovered. Encouraging passengers to input destinations would improve the quality of data harvested for Daimler and would facilitate future enhancements to job allocation methodologies to improve efficiency in vehicle utilisation.
Job Screen - It would be useful if the total fares displayed on the job list included tips where appropriate. The export button should be placed either above or below the scrollview/listview. Having to scroll past dozens of jobs to export month to date is unnecessarily inconvenient.
Job Feedback - The in app procedure for reporting errors and claiming no contact fees is unnecessarily cumbersome, often requiring drivers to type what is already blatantly obvious from the option selected. As an aside I find some of the (presumably prescribed) responses to error reports obnoxious and condescending. I note from taxi fora that many of my colleagues agree with me. Providing defined inputs to report errors suggests that the firm accepts that occasional errors will occur, in which case you should accept that a driver who makes an error and reports the fact that he made an error knows that he made an error hence he doesn’t need to be told to be more careful in future.
Job Cancellation - There should be a facility to cancel a job after POB has been pressed. The design and location of the POB button makes it easy to press in error e.g. when putting the clever phone back in it’s cradle after telephoning the client. Using a slider button is an alternative worthy of consideration. Similarly, having the accept button on the offer screen in the same place as the Go Busy button means that jobs can be accepted in error. Requiring drivers to type feedback to enable the resultant submit button on the cancel screen only serves to delay the process of recovering the job, typing on a tiny keyboard is not conducive with driving a motor car. As an aside, I have also encountered passengers who haven’t been able to cancel jobs as it wasn’t apparent to them that they need to type some sort of gibberish to enable the submit button so they assumed the button just didn’t work - obviously that wastes drivers time and costs the firm money in no contact fees.
