We got the Lyft project as a result of our work with Virgin America. Long story, short: the creative director we'd worked with at Virgin simply left to join Lyft and brought us along. This was one of my favorite things about working at Work & Co: we built real relationships with clients, not merely just transactional project work. The trust carried over.
The brief seemed straightforward: redesign Lyft's website. But the real insight needed concerned who the website was actually for…
Here's the thing about Lyft that many don't think about: it's a two-sided marketplace. You've got drivers on one side and riders on the other. When you open the app and request a ride, you expect a driver to show up in 3-8 minutes. Of course, that only works if there are enough drivers in the right places at the right times. It's a supply and demand problem, and the supply side (drivers) is harder and significantly more expensive to get than riders.
In order to help acquire drivers at low cost, creating driver-focused city pages was one part of our strategy. The existing website wasn't designed for drivers; it was designed for consumers, but consumers don't need a website. They use the mobile app or go straight to the App Store. The website's actual audience was potential drivers researching whether to sign up, and existing users looking for customer support. Once we understood this, we wanted to completely reposition it as a driver recruitment tool.
We started by turning the website into a comprehensive resource for potential drivers. Not using generic marketing copy, but employing actually useful localized content. For example, what's it like to drive in Austin versus San Francisco? Where are the Lyft offices and driver lounges? What are the peak times in your city? What can you realistically expect to earn in Seattle versus Miami? What are the state-specific regulations you need to know about? These are the kinds of questions that seemed most important to our reangling of the product.
Thus, this was more than a content project. We were rebranding the entire website experience to speak directly to drivers while simultaneously maintaining Lyft's personality. The goal was to make potential drivers feel informed, supported, and genuinely excited about the opportunity.
Accordingly, the next problem was the signup flow.
The driver acquisition flow as it existed was a Frankenstein-like system, cobbled, aggregated, and somewhat malformed. Lyft had expanded, market by market, and each new market involved new regulations, new requirements, and new forms bolted onto the existing system. Furthermore, forms were inconsistent across states. Potential drivers might spend 15 minutes filling everything out only to discover at the end that they weren't eligible because of some disqualifying factor the system could have caught immediately. The flow was confusing, non-linear, and had no clear sense of or explicit way to communicate progress.
This was one of the most expensive problems in Lyft's business. Every percentage point of improvement in driver conversion was worth real money.
Rebuilding the entire multi-state system from scratch was too risky. We couldn't just tear it down and rebuild it and expect anything but frustration, head scratching, and scope creep unlike any other we or the client had ever seen before Our approach rather was to build an A/B test set in a simpler market with fewer regulations—somewhere we could prove the concept worked before rolling it out nationally.
The new flow had three core principles: Firstly, tell people upfront if they're not eligible. Second: break the process into clear steps with visible progress. Finally, handle state-specific logic intelligently without forcing users to have to think about it. This echoed work we'd done with Virgin America's booking flow: take something complex and intimidating and make it feel manageable through clear communication and step-by-step progress.
The new flow converted 7% better.
Drivers are expensive to acquire. More drivers mean better wait times. Better wait times attract more riders. More riders mean drivers make more money. Drivers making more money mean they drive more often:t's all a virtuous cycle ushered in by aA 7% improvement in driver conversion that was able to impact the entire two-sided marketplace.