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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

At least in Seattle they now have colored bars that identify the car (you can select the color in the app, it's an LED strip).

http://mashable.com/2015/12/03/uber-spot-light-color-code/

The problem with just having a logo is in many places there are lots of very similar Ubers (oh hey my Prius is here!).

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It's interesting that they let the passenger pick the color. 2 passengers in the same area might both pick the same color and try to locate their driver based on that information alone. Uber knows which pickups are at the same place at the same time and could choose the colors that minimize confusion (some kind of 4D map coloring problem!)

Define a graph by proximity in spacetime. Colour the nodes in different colours

Why limit themselves to single color bars? Gentlemen and women, I invite you to dream bigger!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2JL0xABlrQ&t=1m50s

Why not just disable already picked colors instead and still let the passenger pick a color regardless?

Edit: Fixed a typo.

Why not just pick the color for the customer and ensure there aren't duplicates within the same block or so?

I guess you could do both? Yet still allowing them to pick a color not yet taken within a certain distance could work.

Why?

Just pick it for them. Don't present the user with choices that have no or negative consequences.

Choice is not always good.

Having the choice would probably be useful for colourblind users since some colours would appear more distinct than others.

You could say the same with lack of choice, but someone answered why it might be an issue if you don't have a choice available.

You know, you could just disable colors already picked in close proximity. For maximum distinguishing power, offer primary colors first, then secondary and tertiary colors, and then differences in brightness/saturation.

Unless you're dealing with several dozen cars arriving at once, it should be reasonably distinct, and even if for some freak reason there is more cars than colors, it'll still help sorting through prospective cars more quickly.

You could also do this automatically, but offering the user control over it may help them feel in charge and/or remember the color they picked better than just assigning one.

That's my thoughts on it.

Good point! However, is it important for people to feel in charge of their color? Right now, requesting an Uber is 3 steps (open app, set pickup location, confirm). Why add a 4th step and require another decision? I value simplicity over getting to choose my favorite color (n=1).

You can have any color you like, as long as it's black.

If an Uber driver arrives in a Model T Ford, then at least it will be distinctive I guess.

See, you don't have to make it a separate step though. It'd be something that is initialized with a sane default, and allows you to change it if you want to. A button with the colour the light will be that you can click to open a modal dialog displaying your options. Someone suffering from dicromacy may choose a colour that is more distinct to them.

If you don't care about the color the light is, you'd simply confirm without changing anything.

Another nice tweak would be coloring the app based on your chosen color whilst you are waiting for the ride, making the connection obvious. That should be a fairly simple matter of shifting hues.

Like in Android contacts, when you add a new one it chooses a colour (maybe randomly, I'm not sure if there's a system for it) but you can change it if you want.

I mean it's a general interaction design principle. Provide sane defaults, offer customization. As a corollary, if you need to prompt for data, think long and hard about whether you actually need that data.

Hrm, thinking about it, it'd probably also be neat if it tracked what colours users who do choose pick, and then use that information to deduce their favorites. If any of those are available, it should pick them automatically. Even if I went out of my way to pick orange every time, it'd be nice if the app remembered that and picked orange for me, thus eliminating a step.

It may be worth displaying available colors as smaller squares next to the button like this:

  ┏━━━━━━━━━━━┳━┳━┳━┓
  ┃ primary   ┣━╋━╋━┫
  ┗━━━━━━━━━━━┻━┻━┻━┛

So that I can know at a glance whether or not my favourite colour is available.

Both Uber and Lyft give you the license plate - I just note the first 3 digits and watch for that. I thought that's what everyone did.

In Florida there are no front plates, only on the rear.

Oh right, I forgot some states do this. I even used to live in Alabama, which has the same policy. Coming from Ohio (where I grew up) I always thought this was oddly impractical.

Weird that it's allowed; here in The Netherlands, it's forbidden to have any kind of light in or on your car that's not defined by the standard (e.g. 2 headlights, turn indicators, break lights, etc.).

I don't get why they didn't just do the reverse – have the user's phone screen switch to a random color and tell them when to hold it up so their driver can identify them on the street. You'd still have to do the secondary confirmation with names like you do now, but in terms of just finding the rider it'd be much easier for the driver.

I'd suppose it's a safety issue. I wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that this person has no idea which car they're supposed to get get in.

I actually wrote about something extremely similar back in 2014 [0]. Great to see that they came up with the same approach on their own, and that they simplified it; I'd assumed that the LED would be colour + nickname and not just colour.

[0] https://twitter.com/nouswaves/status/537609194506305537

Thanks to you they can not patent it now...

Always thought Lyft should have done this but by using a color changing LED version of the lighted mustache that some drivers have.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvq07KBfhnQ

I don't get why they don't do what most other countries do. Last N letters on the number plate and color of the car.

That's exactly what they do now. Identifying a color on an LED is easier than reading the license plate of a car across the street or distinguishing one green sedan from another.

… unless you're colorblind.

Perhaps because license plates in the US are fairly small (at least compared to the UK for instance) and not all states require front plates?

They do that, but tag numbers are hard to read at night and from a distance. I'm in Seattle, the color bars are nice (though they should auto-assign them).

Can you also customize the horn the driver honks at you?

And if you get in the wrong car by accident, you might just have to beat up the driver!

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