Beyond Riding: Passenger Engagement with Driver Labor through Gamified Interactions

Jane Hsieh, Emily Regan, Jose Elizalde, Sophia Deng, Haiyi Zhu

Abstract: Modern cities across the globe increasingly rely on ridehail services for on-demand transportation and mobility. But for drivers, such marketed affordances give rise to hidden driver burdens and vulnerabilities that evade the oversight of consumers and regulators. To effectively advance worker protections and motivate more socially responsible practices, consumers must understand the realistic labor, logistics and costs involved with ridehail driving. Through think-aloud nine workshops with 19 drivers and 15 passengers, we explore the potential for gamified in-ride interactions to facilitate engagement with real (and lived) driver experiences, surfacing passenger knowledge gaps around latent working conditions, prompting reflection and shifts in perception of their relative power and consumption behaviors, highlighting drivers’ preferences for creating more immersive and contextualized service experiences, and identifying design opportunities for safe and appropriate passenger-driver interactions that motivate solidarity. In sum, we advance conceptual understandings of social and managerial relations within a ride, uncover future potential for citizen-led labor advocacy, and offer design guidelines for more human-centered workplace technologies.

External IDs:dblp:conf/chi/HsiehREDZ26