Improving UX Through Designing Automations in the Careem Super App
2.5M
Captains onboarded
Drivers on the platform.
1B
Rides completed
Across the super app’s history.
50M
Customers since 2012
The scale the changes had to work at.
The client
Careem started in Dubai in 2012 as a ride-hailing company and grew into the Middle East’s leading super app, adding transportation, deliveries and payments. Uber acquired it in 2020.
It now runs in over 100 cities across 14 countries with 48 million users, and calls its drivers Captains.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
Captains emailed or visited a branch to change a profile picture, a phone number or the city they drive in — and the operations team handled each request by hand.
Challenge 01Hours lost to manual requests
Account unblocking alone cost around 100 hours a month per market, update requests between 300 and 700, and changes to personal data made up roughly a third of all Captain requests in the Saudi Arabian market.
Challenge 02A process that takes a Captain off the road
Updating profile data or uploading documents meant visiting a branch or sending emails, then waiting for the operations team to confirm and enter the information.
Challenge 03Receipts nobody could read
Every trip finished with a receipt setting out the fees and what the Captain had actually earned, and most of them misread the deductions.
What we did
Profile changes that no longer need a person
The goal was to take the operations team out of profile updates entirely, cutting the support cost that comes with them — and secondarily to give Captains back the hours they spend on the update process, to spend driving instead.
The manual model, measured
Netguru worked through the existing processes, identified where they hurt and quantified what the manual handling was costing in hours and budget.
Requests handled by the app
New user flows automate profile changes, so a Captain can now change the city they operate in without raising a request at all.
Deductions made legible
The ride receipt was redesigned around the confusion it was causing about commissions and fees.
Recommendations, step by step
The client continues implementing the remaining recommendations at its own pace.
Client testimonial
What I love about Netguru is that they leave no stone unturned when it comes to understanding the business context of the project. Thanks to their unique approach, we were able to reduce the workload on our operations team whilst improving the user experience of our Captains.
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What’s next