At the airport, drivers have to wait in staging lots to get rides. But sometimes the ride they eventually get is not to their liking and they face a choice: take the undesirable (read, low pay and/or wrong direction) ride or cancel.
Ages ago, to reduce the pain of a surprise bad ride I led the effort to create the Short Ride Bonus product. It works like this: if a driver at the airport gets a ride that turns out to be low-pay (for example, under the 20th percentile of the earnings curve), we offer them the ability to return to the waiting queue at the top of the pack. Basically, they get a do-over and another chance to get a higher pay ride they want.
"Queue bump after this ride" is how the bonus is communicated to drivers.
The result was greater ride completion because drivers were more willing to take different kinds of rides, safe in the knowledge that Lyft would give them another chance at a desirable ride.
The general process I took for getting here was:
1) Assessing business problems - in this case the problem of drivers at the airport queueing lot being discouraged by low-pay rides and rejecting them instead of accepting them. The business problem was low utilization of driver hours and longer wait times for customers.
2) Identifying user problems - Analysis of ride characteristics to figure out which specific rides we needed to make more attractive. User research to ask drivers why they were rejecting certain rides to confirm our hypothesis.
3) Ideating solutions - Range of brainstorming activities to figure out how we could motivate the driver behavior change we wanted to see. Assessed financial mechanisms as well as experiential to see what the pros/cons would be of different approaches.
4) Building and testing the MVP - The MVP product was an SMS to the driver after they completed one of the undesirable rides letting them know they could go back to the airport queueing lot and reclaim their first-in-line position.
5) Iterating into a better product experience - After the success of the MVP product, we spent the time to build this into an in-app notification (still post-ride) which increased the rate at which drivers returned to the queue. Later, we iterated again (once the driver app supported it) into an upfront indicator on the ride accept screen so that drivers would know this short ride was "safe" to take and they'd be able to return to the airport queue and try again for a "better" ride for them.