Driving Innovation: Analyzing Mobile Ridesharing App Interfaces and Moving Toward Community-Based User Experience (CBX)

Abstract

Purpose: Our article interrogates mobile ridesharing apps as sites where digital interfaces, cultural practices, and rhetorical discourses intersect. We establish counter- histories of mobile ridesharing apps and conduct a critical interface analysis of select apps to demonstrate how innovative interfaces imagine a universal user while culturally specific apps make space for community-based user experience (CBX). Method: This article brings together Haas' digital cultural rhetorics (DCR) framework with Brock's critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to zoom in on the cultural ideologies, form, and function of mobile ridesharing apps. Results: Our analysis highlights how developers of culturally specific apps inscribe and promote an ethos of community for users marginalized by Western ideologies regarding race, gender, and sexuality. We show that, despite working in prescribed programming and coding structures, these app developers take advantage of forms and functions to amplify their cultural significance. Conclusion: Rhetoric, technical communication, and UX researchers and practitioners should look to culturally specific mobile ridesharing apps as exemplars for designing technologies that center and acknowledge multiply-marginalized communities and their DCR practices. We insist CBX be part of interface design.