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Inside Lyft’s years-long effort to give its drivers better maps

The ride-share giant is hoping the mapping platform can help drivers maximize their earnings and improve customer experience.

Inside Lyft’s years-long effort to give its drivers better maps

[Source image: alxpin/Getty Images]

BY Jessica Bursztynsky3 minute read

The overwhelming bulk of mapping services have been built with the average consumer in mind: Plug in a destination and instantly get a route, with the option to stop at a Starbucks on the way.

But the services have been less than perfect for ride-share drivers, who pick up several riders per day and sometimes multiple people along routes. Of course, dealing with dozens of people per day leaves loads of room for confusion for all parties involved: Where should the rider stand to get picked up? What is the best way to get around construction?

It’s a problem Lyft has been working to solve for years: determining what mapping functions would most help drivers focus on road signals, and in the process make it easier for riders to get picked up. And now that it’s releasing those revamped maps to a growing number of people in the coming months, the world will get a better glimpse at what next-generation ride-share mapping looks like.

“We really wanted to innovate for [drivers] to make sure that the product was pretty simple to use and glanceable, so you didn’t have to get distracted by trying to figure out the details you need,” Dylan Lorimer, Lyft’s chief product officer, tells Fast Company.

LyftNav launched in the second quarter of 2021 in Dallas. As the company continues to roll out the platform in new markets while getting driver feedback, its efforts appear to be picking up steam. Lyft cofounder John Zimmer said in early November its mapping system was powering about 25% of its rides. By late January, Lorimer says, LyftNav was powering 50% to 60% of the company’s rides.

The hope is that the mapping platform can streamline services, helping drivers maximize their earnings while making the ride-share process more convenient for users.

[Animation: Courtesy of Lyft]

Lyft is also testing road-facing dash cameras in a small subset of drivers’ vehicles; the devices can capture imagery of the environment and feed it back into the map, creating a more up-to-date product. Lorimer stresses that it’s a test with a “few hundred drivers” who get paid for driving with the camera, and it isn’t the only way new routing information is being collected.

[Animation: courtesy of Lyft]

In terms of imagery of the platform, the company opted for a subtle gray background and avoided color-coding businesses, like other platforms do, so drivers can focus on their route, which appears in purple. (The puck, or curser, that shows the driver’s location, was refreshed in a nod to the company’s pink-mustache days.)

Audio is also a key focus for drivers. LyftNav offers the flexibility for drivers to choose when to receive audio guidance. The app is also experimenting with different tones and sounds that drivers hear for directions, a member of the mapping team says.

“When it comes to rideshare, we have very specific goals around providing voice guidance to drivers that is simple but clear, because they’re doing this all day every day, so (we) remove distractions and invest in sort of the specifics and make the experience as intuitive and elegant and ergonomic as possible,” Lorimer says.

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Lyft has more ambitions with the app: the ability to suggest areas where customers might stay dry while waiting for their ride, for example, or where they can meet the driver to help beat congestion on the road. “This is where we really now feel like we’re going to have license to deeply lean into what I call hospitality,” Lorimer says.

Lyft’s navigation efforts come as the company deals with cost-cutting measures as Zimmer and CEO Logan Green said in November was to prepare for a probable recession and rising ride-share insurance costs. Lyft says that each ride that uses its mapping stack can produce more than 10 cents of incremental value for Lyft. It could also make the experience better for consumers and drivers, meaning they’d spend more time using the platform than that of their competitors.

The company plans for the navigation system to transcend just rideshare at some point this year. “Our entire vision,” Lorimer says, “is to be able to, from a consumer point of view, make a really strong, objective recommendation of how [customers] should get [around].”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Bursztynsky is a staff writer for Fast Company, covering the gig economy and other consumer internet companies. She previously covered tech and breaking news for CNBC. More


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