Laurent Kretz

It’s been just about a month that I started testing the alpha of ShareMyCab. The feedback from my friends was very positive … when speaking about the concept. Speaking about the execution, they were, well …. let’s see, “polite” would be the term (I guess). To say things clearly: it sucks. And they pointed their finger at two things:

• the fact that there are two forms to save cab trips; one if the trip is from or to an airport and another if the trip is from two random points,
• the fact that each of the two forms were not clear, complicated, cumbersome, uneasy to understand, …

There is no complexity in ShareMyCab.net. However, there are various ways to save a trip: type an address, click on the map, or choose an airport. And a user has to do it for the departing point and the arrival point. Then of course you can start over. One point, or the other. Then, you have to give a name to your trip, choose a frequency, a date, a time. The “airport trip” form has 6 fields and requires 1 “click” on the map. The “inside the city” (one random point to another) has 7 fields and requires 2 clicks on the map.

And the I am working on a new version of the form. I tried to apply the following guidelines:

• Less is more: the less fields, the better,
• Clarity: I want a 3 years old to understand the form,
• Simplicity: the script has to understand the user, and not the contrary,
• Flexibility: the process has to adapt to the user, and not the contrary - knowing that each user understands and approaches the form his own way,
• Efficiency: the script makes clever decisions based on the user input, limiting the number of decisions/choices the user has to do - various scenarios are tested and the script reacts accordingly.

OK: in fine, this is a lot of BS to just say that the form looks more simple now and that the script is kewler now than it was before ;) . So the features are:

• 1 unique form and 4 fields to save a trip: where from, where to, when and contact.
• If you type something that resembles an airport, the list of corresponding airports will be suggested. If it’s an address, the map will recenter automatically on the typed address. And finally, if you prefer to double click on the map to indicate a starting or ending point, a reverse-geocoding request will give find the closest street (check the source out, really powerful). So whatever your method, I end up with the same result: an address and geographical coordinates.
• The date field is super simple, and I used the DateJS framework. Type anything close to a time indication (Sept 25th, 25, Oct, today, tomorrow, t+1, …) and the script will spit out the date.

That’s it !Unfortunately, days are really busy right now, but I hope to launch into production soon !

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