Emily Mark

Intro

Role: Product Designer (product thinking, visual design & interaction design)
Team: Privacy & Identity at Uber
Tools used: Figma, Principle, pen & paper

Design brief

Only ~20% of active riders had a verified email on their account. The low percentage of active Uber riders with a verified email posed a number of problems.

How might we nudge riders on the Uber platform to verify their email addresses?

Problems

While users can still use Uber without verifying their email, an unverified email address poses a number of problems. And, despite these problems, Uber does not require email verification during sign up due to concerns around growth.

Competitive Analysis

Many social media companies take a softer, more passive approach, whereas cash and payment companies are more strict/blocking regarding email verification.

Regarding the actual verification process, there’s two methods of verifying emails:

1. A one time password (OTP) that gets sent to the user’s email and the user has to return to the app to enter in the password.

2. A one tap verification button embedded in the email that deep links the user to a “verified” confirmation page.

Although the OTP approach requires an extra step of returning to the app, the engineers were firm that they did not want to change that approach as it is a) more secure in validating one’s identity and b) the code was already written/implemented from the past.

Current verification flow

The current flow to verify an email address is more tailored to a user trying to update their email rather than verify their current address. Despite that, it’s concerning that four taps through settings/account there’s no indication the email address is not verified.

Ideation

Uber’s philosophy is to not block unverified users (due to concerns around growth), so I explored a variety of different potential passive approaches to heavier nudges:

• Increasing visibility in account settings

• Nudging the user to verify their email while they’re on a trip

• Creating an entry point within email receipts

• Leveraging Uber’s homepage messaging framework

Available surfaces

I ran into some roadblocks with the more “aggressive” approaches:

• Uber’s messaging framework is primarily reserved for promos and high priority messages (ex: your credit card expired).

• The CTA within the email was a potential privacy issue in the instance an email was forwarded and opened by another user.

• The on trip feed is reserved for only details about the trip, Safety features, and Uber related promotions. Despite the importance of a verified email, stakeholders on the Rider team were not willing to budge on this surface.

Due to these realities, the only surface I was able to work in was the Settings page. Even though the visibility in the Settings page is a bit low, I experimented with different visual design treatments that would bring attention to their “unverified” email status.

Visual design explorations

I explored the use of different colors, iconography, and the words “Verify” versus “Confirm” versus “Unverified.” Ultimately, to give more context to the user why this is important, the team and I landed on the visual treatment that says in orange, “For added security, please verify your email.”

Final design

The final design includes: 1) more visibility on the main Settings page and 2) having “unverified” visible in the Edit Account page 3) and CTA changed from “Update Email” to “Verify Email.”

This increased email verification design project was rolled out to 100% of users in the US and Canada in Q2 2019 with plans for global rollout later this year. Although the approach was more passive, Rider email verification rates grew from 19.96% to 30.47%.

Future thinking

For the next version(s), my team and I were exploring how we could make the experience even more visible, rather than continuing to have it buried within the Settings. One possible surface was in the left navigation hamburger menu, where visibility is much higher.

Takeaways

Every team at Uber wants to broadcast their features and messages to users — we tend to think our projects are the most important and deserve the most attention. Sometimes, though, it’s okay to opt for a more passive approach, learn from the data, and implement different strategies for next iterations.