Bytes

Feedback I submitted to Wayne after my first experience with their service.

I wanted to share feedback from my ride today as a passenger and UX designer. Overall, I think it would be helpful if passengers had a way to give real-time feedback or communicate with the vehicle during unusual situations.

Until the car can fully read and interpret all surrounding context, there may be moments where input from passengers could help the vehicle respond more appropriately. In a sense, passengers could act as limited “backseat drivers” by providing context the car may not understand yet.

During my ride, there was one point where the car seemed to pull over near a couple of people standing on the sidewalk, even though we were not picking anyone up. In that moment, it would have been helpful to ask the car what it was doing or provide a quick correction if it was misinterpreting the situation.

Another issue happened near my destination, where a conference was taking place. Traffic patterns were different than normal, and there was a sign at the drop-off area that said: “Keep Moving.” The car appeared to take some time to determine that it could not stop there.

It then seemed to pull into a parking lot, but there was a backup of cars, so the vehicle stopped with the rear of the car still in the street and blocking traffic. At that point, the car signaled for me to get out. After I got out, the vehicle said I had left items behind, but I checked and had not left anything. I dismissed the message in the app, expecting the car to move, but it still seemed unsure what to do because of the people and traffic around it. Fortunately, someone directing traffic was able to get people to move back so the car could proceed.

In that situation, it would have been helpful if I could have given a simple instruction such as “pull fully into the parking lot before drop-off” or “this area is temporarily keep-moving only.” I understand there would need to be safety limits around what passengers can tell the vehicle to do, but some kind of structured feedback or context input could help avoid awkward or unsafe positioning.

Real-time passenger feedback could also provide useful training data for specific locations and similar edge cases in other areas. Even if the car does not immediately follow passenger input (although that would be helpful), allowing riders to communicate what they are seeing could help the system better understand unusual road conditions and improve future rides.