Improving the process flow and increasing the clarity of my mobile app

Question

I've been redeveloping the notifications/ride sharing option in my taxi booking and sharing application.

The Premise

When a user requests a seat in a taxi you've booked, then you receive a notification. Prior to making a decision of accepting or rejecting a request, you get to see the implications that it has on your existing journey. The things that change include your journey details change, price, journey time and distance. Secondly if you had 4 seats available in your taxi, it gets reduced to 3.

I'm concerned about the current process flow (whether or not it can be streamlined), and the clutter that the user sees (which is important clutter, but needs to be more clear - as it is meant to show the implications accepting a ride share has on your existing journey). I'll go through each step one by one and explain.

Step 1

• Fairly straightforward, the user receives a notification and then can view it prior to make a decision whether or not they want to share their journey with a friend.

Step 2

• Some more details are presented here about the journey that you pre-booked that the user (Paul) wants to ride share

• The old price/journey time/journey distance is struck out (is this necessary, do you think it is a good idea - can this be displayed better? if so in what way) and the new price/journey time/journey distance is displayed below.

• The user can expand the share requests to view more details

• The user gets information on how many seats are currently available in the taxi

Step 3

• Details about there the prospective ride sharer wants to be picked up and how much their willing to pay is detailed here

• The journey Great Holm - Central Milton Keynes is the user's journey, whereas the journey Beanhill - Central Milton Keynes is the prospective ride-sharer's journey, so the taxi will go from Great Holm - Beanhill - Central Milton Keynes

• The user can collapse this information

• As you can see that there is no information on how many seats are currently available (had to remove this to accommodate the Accept and Decline, but I need it to be there) buttons

Concerns

My main concern is the clutter on step 3. I'm worried about the screen looking too busy.

All of the information is important to the user hosting the journey, but can I simplify it to make it look easier.

I want to highlight the positive/negative implications that having an extra person share the ride. But at the same time, I'm worried about cognitive overload.

Is there a way to restructure the UI to make it a bit clearer to read? I'd appreciate any feedback. I want to really ensure that the user is provided with enough information, that they can make sense of in a glance.

Answer 1

You're asking us to make assumptions, because you assume something is amiss. We could give you pointers or give examples in the form of mockups we make ourself, but that's just another opinion from another designer or ux specialist.

To my opinion, what you need is feedback from actual users. I think you should make a prototype out of these mockups and ask some of your friends to test it. Watch them use it and make them think out loud. Give them easy tasks and see if they can complete those. Let them be the judge about if it's cluttered or not.
Make sure you don't ask them what they want to see in an app, they don't know and if they know it's BS. Just let them interact with the prototype and see what their reaction is.

I personally use Proto.io as a prototyping tool. Facebook released their prototyping tool Origami last week, but there are plenty of other free tools you could use. Google it ;)