UBER’S FOUNDERS DIDN’T invent Uber for drivers. They invented it for themselves, a couple of guys in San Francisco who wanted to be ballers by summoning limos from their phones. Then they invented it for ballers like themselves—upscale urbanites, mostly. Then they invented it for anyone who wanted to get anywhere by “pool” or “x” or “SUV” or “helicopter,” even if they didn’t care about being baller. Push a button, get a car. On the other end of that button there have always been drivers, picking up rides from an app that has looked and functioned pretty much the same since the company launched. And for drivers, the Uber app was decidedly un-baller.

That changes today, as the company rolls out its first redesigned app for its partners. It’s the culmination of a massive, yearlong design process to which nearly 100 Uber employees contributed. The new app will transform Uber’s driver software into a management platform offering tools to help its drivers tend and grow their businesses. “We’ve had this fragmented communication with drivers over email and we just didn’t have information available for them,” says Jeff Holden, the longtime Amazon executive who joined Uber last year as head of product. “We wanted to completely re-invent the driver app.”

The new app reflects how the company’s take on design has evolved in the six years since it was founded. From the start, Uber’s simplicity was its selling point. And that approach was easy to maintain when the product was new and the team was small. “There’s this core principal of seamless design, there was that magic associated with pushing a button and getting a car,” says Nundu Janakiram, who, as Uber’s Head of Core Experience, first championed the redesign. “How can you apply that same magic to more things? That’s the Uber design philosophy we try to pull through all the products that we build.” more…