How we build a new generation taxi
Hello to the whole habr community!
In this article, we finally gathered our thoughts and decided to share what many habrayuzers asked us about - more technical and software aspects of the development of our service. In this post you will learn how the formation and development of the taxi service of a completely newpost-Soviet generation is going .
Having received strong feedback (to all the Khabrovites who follow our development and leave feedback, a separate and very big thank you!), We have made some improvements and conveniences in the taxi booking process.
Not all people know the area of the city where they are, and choosing it from the list takes time. Therefore, we removed the areas from the application by developing a technology for determining your coordinates so that your application is sent only to the nearest drivers. On the one hand, we have thereby done better for customers - only the nearest drivers will receive the application, which means they will come for you faster. On the other hand, drivers also received a plus - you do not need to view all applications in a row, you can only receive the next ones. About how exactly we did this, see below.
Now, in just 2 clicks, you can choose a ready-made address from the history of your trips, and you don’t have to enter it again - it’s very convenient and now it will really be faster than calling a taxi.
Caring for the convenience and time saving of our current and future customers, we have created a convenient auto-filling of streets - just enter the first two letters of the street, and the system will offer options. The same database includes various well-known institutions in your city. The freshness, relevance and occupancy of such a base will be monitored by our official representatives in the cities.
On some days (bad weather, holidays, etc.), taxi services have a heavy load and you are usually either ignored (do not pick up the phone), politely fed with promises, or honestly say an impressive waiting time. We decided to meet the needs of users in such a sensitive issue and made transparent statistics of drivers on the network - how many are online at all and how many of them are now free to take your order.
Now you can really assess the situation - is it worth the wait for an answer or use the services of some other company. Or even "score" and do not go anywhere. :)
To visually see the process of downloading the application, despite all the hardships of the harsh Russian cellular communications and unpredictable mobile Internet, we made this progress bar:
In traditional taxi services, the city is conditionally divided into the so-called "parking". The driver is marked on which one he is on, in order to receive only short-range orders from dispatchers. Or, the driver installs additional equipment for himself, so that the dispatcher determines his location via GPS using quite expensive software.
We did everything differently - introducing the technology of dividing the city map into squares with a width of 700 meters and having the driver’s coordinate, we determine its square, and the system offers him applications only from this and the nearest squares, without showing him more distant applications. If, for any application, it was not possible to determine the coordinate or in the radius of less than two drivers, the application is sent to everyone.
Thus, we optimize the distribution of orders, offering drivers the closest orders, and customers the nearest drivers. Convenient and beneficial to both those and others.
In order for the driver to not burden himself with spending on a GPS device to determine his location, we decided to implement in the application an entry point for the nearest address (street + house). Thus, the driver sets his location on the map manually. When the driver takes the application, the end point from this application is copied to this field, significantly automating the input of a landmark to determine his location. Such a little trick.
In the near future, we are faced with the task of finally creating an Android application for drivers. It will be cool and comfortable, we promise.
Having included logic, common sense, economy and the wise advice of the midfielders, we collected all our software stuff and transferred it to European servers, away from Russia. Now the application processing servers of all countries are hosted on one European server.
In addition, the server has better performance than the previous one, which greatly affects the speed of data processing, as well as other parallel tasks (batch processing of statistical data, automatic assembly of applications for dealers / partners of the system, as well as other software functions).
Innovations in our company also affected the service website ( Taxofly.com ).
We decidedly and radically changed the logo (partly your advice and disapproval of the previous logo affected us). Further, the entire site design has changed and this process, by the way, is still ongoing. Along with the change of name, the address changed from taxolet.ru to taxofly.com.
Having set as our goal the optimization of all processes, we also created a single entry point for everyone (authorization in personal accounts). In the near future, we have the task of adding the client and driver’s office there as well. But we won’t tell you anything about them yet. :)
We developed the main page of the site in such a way as to clearly and focusedly convey to our visitors our essence, advantages and opportunities. Whether we were able to do this is up to you, again.
In the section "About the company" we have definitely decided to include such important points as the goals of the company, its mission and a brief history of development. We also decided to write about our team, adding a photo and a brief description of employees to the site so that people can see who exactly is working on the implementation of this project. In our opinion, it is important for any company to be open and transparent to its customers, as well as know its mission and communicate it to customers. A little later we will add to this section the heads of our branches in other countries.
Having seen many terrible and huge web-based taxi booking forms, we were once confused. On the one hand, a web form should of course provide many features and functions, but it feels like all the companies on this issue have gone too far.
Our motto and mission is the simplicity and speed of ordering, so the web form has turned out to be very simple, but, surprisingly, more functional, providing not just sending your order somewhere in the walls of the dispatch office, but directly to the drivers and giving you the right car selection - real-time feedback. Still, the 21st century.
In addition, we also made it possible to memorize the telephone number you entered, the selected city and the last address entered, greatly facilitating your next taxi order. In the "Street" field, the system will offer you options from the database after entering at least the first two letters, slightly reducing and simplifying the whole process of ordering a taxi.
The design also improved slightly, making the whole process of ordering a taxi more convenient and visual.
It is up to you to decide how we manage to modernize and improve the scope of taxi services. We are pleased to hear all your wishes and suggestions that could help us in this.
In the next post, we will tell you what changes have occurred in our cooperation schemes, without which it is impossible to develop and promote such a project in many cities of any country at once. We will also tell you about how we improved working tools for taxi services - service partners and what new opportunities they now have.
In this article, we finally gathered our thoughts and decided to share what many habrayuzers asked us about - more technical and software aspects of the development of our service. In this post you will learn how the formation and development of the taxi service of a completely new
Innovations in taxi booking applications
Having received strong feedback (to all the Khabrovites who follow our development and leave feedback, a separate and very big thank you!), We have made some improvements and conveniences in the taxi booking process.
We removed the choice of the district of the city
Not all people know the area of the city where they are, and choosing it from the list takes time. Therefore, we removed the areas from the application by developing a technology for determining your coordinates so that your application is sent only to the nearest drivers. On the one hand, we have thereby done better for customers - only the nearest drivers will receive the application, which means they will come for you faster. On the other hand, drivers also received a plus - you do not need to view all applications in a row, you can only receive the next ones. About how exactly we did this, see below.
Travel History Added
Now, in just 2 clicks, you can choose a ready-made address from the history of your trips, and you don’t have to enter it again - it’s very convenient and now it will really be faster than calling a taxi.
Street Database
Caring for the convenience and time saving of our current and future customers, we have created a convenient auto-filling of streets - just enter the first two letters of the street, and the system will offer options. The same database includes various well-known institutions in your city. The freshness, relevance and occupancy of such a base will be monitored by our official representatives in the cities.
Ability to see service load
On some days (bad weather, holidays, etc.), taxi services have a heavy load and you are usually either ignored (do not pick up the phone), politely fed with promises, or honestly say an impressive waiting time. We decided to meet the needs of users in such a sensitive issue and made transparent statistics of drivers on the network - how many are online at all and how many of them are now free to take your order.
Now you can really assess the situation - is it worth the wait for an answer or use the services of some other company. Or even "score" and do not go anywhere. :)
Android users we gave a progress bar
To visually see the process of downloading the application, despite all the hardships of the harsh Russian cellular communications and unpredictable mobile Internet, we made this progress bar:
Innovations in applications for drivers
Off parking and areas
In traditional taxi services, the city is conditionally divided into the so-called "parking". The driver is marked on which one he is on, in order to receive only short-range orders from dispatchers. Or, the driver installs additional equipment for himself, so that the dispatcher determines his location via GPS using quite expensive software.
We did everything differently - introducing the technology of dividing the city map into squares with a width of 700 meters and having the driver’s coordinate, we determine its square, and the system offers him applications only from this and the nearest squares, without showing him more distant applications. If, for any application, it was not possible to determine the coordinate or in the radius of less than two drivers, the application is sent to everyone.
Thus, we optimize the distribution of orders, offering drivers the closest orders, and customers the nearest drivers. Convenient and beneficial to both those and others.
"Pseudo-GPS"
In order for the driver to not burden himself with spending on a GPS device to determine his location, we decided to implement in the application an entry point for the nearest address (street + house). Thus, the driver sets his location on the map manually. When the driver takes the application, the end point from this application is copied to this field, significantly automating the input of a landmark to determine his location. Such a little trick.
Give Android!
In the near future, we are faced with the task of finally creating an Android application for drivers. It will be cool and comfortable, we promise.
Server optimization
Having included logic, common sense, economy and the wise advice of the midfielders, we collected all our software stuff and transferred it to European servers, away from Russia. Now the application processing servers of all countries are hosted on one European server.
In addition, the server has better performance than the previous one, which greatly affects the speed of data processing, as well as other parallel tasks (batch processing of statistical data, automatic assembly of applications for dealers / partners of the system, as well as other software functions).
Our site is our face.
Innovations in our company also affected the service website ( Taxofly.com ).
We decidedly and radically changed the logo (partly your advice and disapproval of the previous logo affected us). Further, the entire site design has changed and this process, by the way, is still ongoing. Along with the change of name, the address changed from taxolet.ru to taxofly.com.
Having set as our goal the optimization of all processes, we also created a single entry point for everyone (authorization in personal accounts). In the near future, we have the task of adding the client and driver’s office there as well. But we won’t tell you anything about them yet. :)
We developed the main page of the site in such a way as to clearly and focusedly convey to our visitors our essence, advantages and opportunities. Whether we were able to do this is up to you, again.
In the section "About the company" we have definitely decided to include such important points as the goals of the company, its mission and a brief history of development. We also decided to write about our team, adding a photo and a brief description of employees to the site so that people can see who exactly is working on the implementation of this project. In our opinion, it is important for any company to be open and transparent to its customers, as well as know its mission and communicate it to customers. A little later we will add to this section the heads of our branches in other countries.
Ordering a taxi online is now really convenient
Having seen many terrible and huge web-based taxi booking forms, we were once confused. On the one hand, a web form should of course provide many features and functions, but it feels like all the companies on this issue have gone too far.
Our motto and mission is the simplicity and speed of ordering, so the web form has turned out to be very simple, but, surprisingly, more functional, providing not just sending your order somewhere in the walls of the dispatch office, but directly to the drivers and giving you the right car selection - real-time feedback. Still, the 21st century.
In addition, we also made it possible to memorize the telephone number you entered, the selected city and the last address entered, greatly facilitating your next taxi order. In the "Street" field, the system will offer you options from the database after entering at least the first two letters, slightly reducing and simplifying the whole process of ordering a taxi.
The design also improved slightly, making the whole process of ordering a taxi more convenient and visual.
Total for today
It is up to you to decide how we manage to modernize and improve the scope of taxi services. We are pleased to hear all your wishes and suggestions that could help us in this.
In the next post, we will tell you what changes have occurred in our cooperation schemes, without which it is impossible to develop and promote such a project in many cities of any country at once. We will also tell you about how we improved working tools for taxi services - service partners and what new opportunities they now have.
