Tripmi

TripMi was a web App aimed at commuters who wished to carpool. The site connected people based on routes and commute times, allowing them to view profiles of potential carpool partners, and message each other to arrange their journeys. I was hired to plan, design, and manage the development of the product. 

TripMi was an excellent test bed for ideas around how to encourage people who don’t know each other to connect with each other, and then meet in real life.

Users could create profiles and provide optional further information, such as if they smoked,  if they liked to chat in the car, and what their preferred radio station was, among other things. When two users were matched based on a route and schedule they could review this information to decide to connect, and have the benefit of some ice-breaking knowledge of each other when they did take a journey together.

TripMi is unfortunately no longer with us. While it was active it was reasonably successful in completing the goal of connecting carpool partners, in particular in smaller community groups, but the number of active users needed to be much bigger to make an impact. TripMi may have had greater traction if we had developed a way to show existing social connections between our users by connecting their other social networks. We took a few steps down this road, but the budget didn’t allow for further development.