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Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

What Uber is doing is likely by design, for the most part. They do highlight the user journeys in the app that generate more revenue, over others that might be cheaper or more close to what you need. That usually means the lower-revenue paths get more convoluted and longer.

On the other hand if you’re price insensitive, you should be able to be on your way fairly easily. What they have is not necessarily bad UI, it just doesn’t have your optimum as the highest priority.

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What does this even mean? Uber extracts money from you when you take rides. So how is a UI that makes it overly complicated to do that “designed to extract as much money from you as possible”?

Taking an Uber ride is easy as long as you don’t want to optimise for prices. I meant extracting as much money from you as possible in the context of other options in the app that might be more economical for you (if you don’t mind waiting, for example), not in the sense that Uber providing a service for you is somehow an involuntary extraction.

It wasn’t clear before so I edited the comment, my apologies.

Do they still have surge pricing? I once paid $289 for a 14 minute ride at 3am Jan 1.

They do, they just stopped calling it surge pricing (or anything else). They just show you the higher price with a microscopic grey text underneath that says 'there's a lot of demand, prices are higher now'. If you don't take that route often and know the average price, like when you're travelling or in a city that you're unfamiliar with, you'd be excused to think that's the normal price and just go for it instead of waiting a few more minutes or checking Lyft instead.

Sneaky sneaky

In some regions Uber offers multiple results for your journey, including both Uber cars but also local public transport eg bus.

It’s possible they don’t support that in your city so you may just see the cars.

They also offer helicopters and boats in some cities.

You can make the happy easy path the most profitable choice, and make the less profitable choices harder to use.

Imagine a "tap here to go home" button that automatically calls an UberX Black Elite(tm) car and takes you to your already-designated home location. But if you want to use a regular uber, or uber pool or whatever, you have to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, don't forget to set your destination, maybe key in where you are right now since location services can be unreliable in some environments? Wouldn't want the car dispatched to the wrong location now would we?

Next you'll tell me they put the sweets (candy) at the counter in the shops (stores) for the customers ... seriously.

I read your comment 3 times. I still can't understand what you're saying.

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