Case file

PideTaxi

PideTaxi is the app of Spain's radio-taxi association, ARTE: 18,000 licensed cabs in more than a hundred cities, on iOS, on Android, and on the web. It is not a ride-hailing company. It is the taxi trade itself, answering the apps that had started taking its passengers.

The app already existed when I arrived, and it looked its age. The brief was a face-lift: the same service, made current and made easy, without changing what a taxi is.

One thing about the service decided the shape of the design. A PideTaxi cab can be booked from the phone, or hailed from the kerb the way taxis always have been. Either way the trip runs on the passenger's account, not the driver's. The street hail, the one thing a taxi has that an app does not, stays inside the system rather than outside it.

2 Chapter

My role

I designed the three surfaces: the iOS app, the Android app, and the public website. Research, journey mapping, wireframes, screen flows, visual design and interaction design, through to developer handoff. Version 4.0.1 is the last one that is mine.

The service, including the street-hail model, was there before me. What I designed is how a passenger understands it.

Chapter 01· iOS

Redesign a working taxi app so that a stranger can book, ride and pay without being taught, while keeping every kind of trip the taxi trade already offers.

The app had a job before it had a design problem. PideTaxi's cars are licensed taxis with meters, regulated fares and a radio dispatch behind them. The competition was apps that had none of that and looked better. So the face-lift could not become a copy. A taxi is hailed from the street. A taxi is paid in cash, or on a card terminal in the back seat, or on a company account when the passenger is on the clock. A taxi will take someone who has not decided where they are going yet. None of that exists in a ride-hailing app, and all of it had to survive the redesign. I started from iOS, and it became the reference the Android work was translated from.

Decision

The payer is not always the rider

A ride-hailing app has one payer: the account holder, with a card on file. A taxi has never worked that way, and the passengers this app serves did not either. The payment sheet lists them all at the same level. Cash. The card terminal in the back of the cab. A saved card. And a subscriber account, which is a company paying for its employee's journey, with its own name and its own billing details kept apart from the passenger's. That last one is the design problem in miniature. The person in the seat is not the person who pays, and the screen has to serve the one who is present without hiding the one who is not. So subscriber accounts are chosen like any other method, and the invoice goes where it belongs.

Decision

Know who is coming before they arrive

The wait is where a taxi app is judged, and this screen shows a person before it shows a car: photo, name, rating, and a call button, above a route drawn to where the passenger is standing, with the minutes left. None of that is decoration. A licensed taxi comes with a licence, a driver and a meter, and those are the things a ride-hailing app cannot promise. Putting the driver's identity on screen first is how the app makes the taxi's own argument for it.

Decision

The door is short, and it does not lie

Sign-up is one thing per screen. Email, then a name, then a password, then the code that proves the phone is real, and each step has its expired state and its error state, because a verification code that arrives late is not an edge case on a phone that just landed in a foreign country. What the app does not do is pretend. If there is no taxi near the passenger, the screen says so. The searching state has a no taxi outcome designed into it, rather than a spinner that runs until the passenger gives up.

Result · The iOS app shipped as version 4.0.1 and became the reference for the Android build. What it demonstrably produced: a booking that accepts every way a taxi is paid for, a wait that shows the passenger who is coming, and a sign-up short enough to finish on a kerb. The app is on the App Store today. No figures from the redesign were shared with me, and none are claimed. Next chapter: Android, the same product on a platform with its own grammar.

Chapter 02· Android

Rebuild the iOS design for Android without it becoming a second product: one service, one set of decisions, two platforms that each feel native.

Android was not a port. The iOS work was finished first and became the reference; the Android work is a translation of it, screen for screen, into a platform with different conventions for where things sit and how they move. The temptation on a second platform is to redesign. The discipline is to change only what the platform changes. Every decision in the iOS chapter holds here. What differs is the grammar.

Decision

Two ways to begin, kept as two states

A taxi takes you before it knows where. That is a real difference from a ride-hailing app, where the destination is the first field and the price depends on it, and it is the difference that was easiest to lose in a redesign. So the booking screen has two states rather than one form. No destination is complete on its own: pickup from the map, payment, options, and Ride now live. Defined destination adds a line and a heart to save it, and with them what only a destination can give: the route and the estimate. Ride now and the payment do not change. The street hail, translated into a screen.

Decision

The same wait, in the platform's own hand

Put the two platforms side by side and the wait is the same wait: route drawn to the passenger, minutes left, driver's face and name before the car. That is the design surviving the translation. What changed is the grammar. The menu is a drawer that slides in from the edge. The cancel is a text action in the corner rather than a bordered button. The schedule lives on a floating button. The keyboard, the back gesture, the system font: all Android's, none of them the design's to override.

Result · The Android app shipped alongside iOS and is on Google Play today, three major versions on. What the translation demonstrably kept: every decision from the reference, including the one that matters most, a booking that can begin without a destination. No figures from the redesign were shared with me, and none are claimed. Next chapter: The website, one claim and everything in service of it.

PideTaxi