I had a few after-work drinks last Friday and caught an Uber home — this was always the plan, although I probably had one (or three) too many drinks on an empty stomach and was a little drunk (not part of the original intention). In the Uber I was looking up MenuLog on my phone to order some delicious greasyness to sober up. I couldn’t decide what to order, and got distracted talking with my colleague I was sharing the ride with. I must have dropped my phone. Once I got inside my house I realise I’d forgotten my phone inside the car. I tipped out the contents of my bag, and was now sure it was lost.
I pulled out my laptop and went to the Uber website. I logged in (somehow I could remember my password) and there’s a convenient Lost Items button. I click it.
Step 1 — log in to Uber and click ‘Lost items’
Step 1 — log in to Uber and click ‘Lost items’
Easy.
Next it asks me to enter a phone number.
Step 2 — enter a phone number
Don’t make me think. I’ve been drinking, so I put in my phone number. Oops — That’s not going to work. My phone is in the Uber. And on silent. And not even on vibrate. So that won’t help.
I realize this and ask my partner for his phone number to enter (who knows phone numbers by heart anymore). Uber does some magic to call the entered phone number back and connect to the driver. The Uber driver comes back and I get him some cash since he had to cancel a trip to drop my phone back off.
The user is drunk
— Will Dayble
Will Dayble once said “the user is drunk”. He meant the user has such little attention to put towards your product that they might as well be drunk. In this case, the user was actually drunk. The process was fairly smooth but there are a few nuances that could improve the UX:
- Make it clearer that I need to enter a phone number I have access to (not my phone that is in the Uber)
- Provide a way to do this if I do not have any secondary phone. If I lived alone I would have been without a phone
- Tell me what to do more explicity. The site mentions that the driver’s don’t get paid to return lost items, but a guide of what to give them would be useful. In my intoxicated state I just gave him a handful of gold coins, I honestly have no idea what I gave him or if it was enough.