It has just been revealed that Uber has this week undergone a complete overhaul, with a primary focus on improving the app’s speed and efficiency.
“It’s not just a normal update,” Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick said during a press briefing at Uber’s San Francisco headquarters earlier this week. “This is a radical redesign and rebuild of the app from scratch.”
Ever since Uber was introduced in 2009, it has become increasingly popular worldwide. According to Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, there are now so many users that Uber has found it difficult to keep up.
“Over the years, things got more complicated,” Mr Kalanick said. “We needed a new system to deal with the growing set of features that were piling up on an older design.”
The changes, which have already started rolling out globally, were designed with a huge number of improvements. There is now a faster loading time for apps, a personalised user experience with more pickup options and most importantly, an improved and efficient pickup procedure.
“Time is a luxury, and our engineers really took that to heart,” said Uber Senior Product Manager, Yuhki Yamashita at the press briefing.
When opening the new app, passengers will either be able to type their location or select a personalised suggestion that appears on the screen, such as work, home or somewhere else they frequently visit. Users can also choose what kind of service they prefer, including premium, economy and more.
The app has already started to introduce a number of other features, such as passengers being able to connect their digital calendar to the Uber app so that Uber will know where and when they’re going somewhere. The app will also offer optimised premium pickup points that suggest the best locations for users to meet drivers based on their final destinations and current road obstacles.
Uber has partnered with Foursquare, Snapchat, Pandora and Yelp to implement some of these upgrades. They plan to announce more partners soon.
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