The number of users or potential users of hitchhiking systems in Brazil interviewed in this research through questionnaires was a total of 100 people. Importantly say that for these questions we chose to use the word “site” in order to represent any system used to ride through the Internet: communities on Orkut, Facebook groups, or specific systems for this purpose.
(Quick note: I didn't have time yet to check spelling errors or anything like that, but the first step of getting this text in English by some friends collaboration was done and I will come back to check it soon.)
As Chart 1 shows, 1.71% of the interviewed said that if they needed to travel, the first feature would look for who would have his own car to ask for a ride. Have another 26% said they would do by public transport. Nevertheless, as shown in Chart 2, 2.91% of people responded that chose to use the ride as a means of transportation to other cities of their regions or states.
(Quick note: I didn't have time yet to check spelling errors or anything like that, but the first step of getting this text in English by some friends collaboration was done and I will come back to check it soon.)
As Chart 1 shows, 1.71% of the interviewed said that if they needed to travel, the first feature would look for who would have his own car to ask for a ride. Have another 26% said they would do by public transport. Nevertheless, as shown in Chart 2, 2.91% of people responded that chose to use the ride as a means of transportation to other cities of their regions or states.
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Chart 1: Identifying the mode of transports mostly used by the survey respondents. |
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Chart 2: Identifying the regions in within the respondents would like to have as options to travel through: through neighborhoods, through cities, through states or through countries. |
The majority of the interviewed, representing 76% of the answers, stated that they had used or use social network Facebook to request or offer rides, followed by 65% who responded do it or have it done it before through Orkut. Moreover specific systems for hitchhiking were used by 28% of respondents, as can be seen in Chart 3.
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Chart 3: Identifying what are the systems available on the internet mostly used by the respondents in order to find a carpooling partner. |
From the 90 people who responded to the questionnaire, only 1 responded that it would not nor would catch a ride with people who are his friend on social networks. In contrast, as Chart 4 shows 71 people (corresponding to 79% of respondents) said they would, accompanied by 17 other (19% of respondents) do not exclude the possibility.
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Chart 4: Identifying the relevance of integrating carpooling systems with social networks. |
With the aim to verify which are the main methods to hitchhiking used by people that have been interviewed was given a temporal condition of vacations with five different answers. As we can see in the Chart 5, 48% of respondents said that they would try to find a ride talking about their needs to their friends. Half of this group said that would accept rides from people that they know or have a mutual friend but the other half said that they would accept a ride from anyone that was going to the same place.
The results also revealed that 31% of the respondents prefer to try to find a carpooling partner on Orkut or Facebook, when only 4% of the others would use any of the carpooling systems currently available in Brazil.
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Chart 5: Identifying the method mostly used by the respondents in order to find a carpooling partner. |
Were also made questions which the main goals were to identify the main reasons why the participants decided to use or not hitchhiking as a mean of transportation. As shown in Chart 6 and Chart 7, 67% of the participantes said they would use this option with the primary purpose of saving money on transportation, and 31% said that the main reason to not use this mean of transportation it is the fear of traveling with strangers, i.e., people who are not in their friendship circle.
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Chart 6: Identifying the respondents main motivation for using carpool as an option of transportation. |
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Chart 7: Identifying the respondents main demotivation for not considering carpooling as an option of trasportation. |
The fear towards the partner with whom one could travel can also be observed in two of the three most voted options in the question illustrated in Chart 8. 57% of the participants said that the fact they could write and read informations about the personality of a user of the system is a important feature in a system which the main goal is to promove offers and requests for hitchhiking. The possibility to write and read what people wrote about the experience of traveling with the users was also also highlighted by 73% of the participants as an essential functionality of the system.
Still about Chart 8, it´s important to highlight that according to most of the respondents (79% of them) the most important characteristic is a good usability, what means, the system is expected to be easy to use. In the other hand, the less important characteristics pointed were: the use of geolocation tools (like GPS) during the process to set up the trip route for the ride was chose by 46% of the respondents; and the possibility of restrict the view of the ride offers or requests to only certain groups was chose by 39%.
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Chart 8: Identifying what features the respondents expect to find in a carpooling system. |
About the systems used by the respondents when requesting or offering rides, 36% of them pointed that it is hard to find offers according to their needs, and 56% see as low the amount of information related to users. Although, most of them (61% of the respondents), evaluated the systems as easy to use when it comes to the process of creating they offer or request. This results are illustrated on Chart 9.
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Chart 9: Identifying the importance of features with which the users could show how they trust in each other. |
From the knowledge acquired with this research, a carpooling system proposal that could match all the requirements set by the these possible users was built. In this proposal, a possible design for this carpooling system is illustrated with many diagrams and interfaces. Additionally,
the text and the charts used in the current post are also part of the Proposal of a cross-platform carpooling system.
THANKS: Our special thanks to +Polyanna Rocha, +Philippe Meneghini, +Evaristo Colomby and Marcel Alvaro for contributing with making this post understandable by English speakers. ;)
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