Lyft's makeover makes it way easier to find a bus, bike, or e-scooter
The Lyft app was overhauled more than a year ago to focus on shared rides. Now it's got a new look for all the other ways you can get around with Lyft: bike-shares, e-scooters, car rentals, and even the city bus.
Lyft's new look brings all your available travel options to the home screen starting Wednesday. While we're used to seeing only cars driving around, in the coming weeks users will see other options sitting on the map. If you live in a city where Lyft runs a bike-share program, you'll see nearby bikes to rent. Same with e-scooters, rentals, and nearby buses or trains.
"The redesign will drive people in the direction of non-driving options," Caroline Samponaro, Lyft's head of micromobility policy, said in a phone call this week.
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Another change: Instead of only showing ride requests, all the different options will be available in different tabs that you select on the main page. The scooter icon is for scooters, the bus for public transit ... you get it.
Samponaro said the tabs "make it something they always see with the Lyft app." In testing, Lyft saw higher engagement with bikes, scooters, and public transit options when they were presented front and center instead of buried within the app. Samponaro credits the app's transparency for clearly showing "it's going to be faster and cheaper" to unlock a bicycle or catch a train than to wait for a ride to come to you.
Lyft scooters are now in more than 15 cities, the bike-sharing network Lyft acquired from Motivate last year is in eight cities, and seven cities integrate local transit options within the Lyft app, including Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle.
Recently, one out of every eight rides was on a bike or scooter — moving Lyft closer to its (somewhat ironic) car-free travel goals.
The Lyft revamp comes as Uber gears up for some app changes as well. On Thursday, Uber is expected to reveal new products and features, but already the app looks a bit different (at least in my San Francisco-based version), with two tabs at the bottom of the home screen — "Ride" and "Order food." The food tab opens up Uber Eats, the food delivery service.
Tabs in apps are apparently the new trend for ride-hailing — and all the other modes for getting around.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
