Half of online platform workers earn less than $2 per hour.
-International Labour Organisation, 2021
THE PROBLEM
The Platform Economy
Apps like Deliveroo, Uber, and JustEat provide one of the most controlling forms of work in over a century. These companies carefully craft the working experience of delivery riders in order to reduce labour costs. Riders don't know how their pay is determined or how they are rated, and therefore don’t know why their contract might be terminated. An increase in riders has resulted in a reduction in the cost and frequency of orders. Riders are now working longer hours for less pay.
Libera In Action
Answer questions while you go about your shift to glean better insights into your work.
Converse and organise with other riders.
Libera passively collects data while you work.
Then see the insights from your work.
And compare with other riders.
Track your work
Fill in the gaps
Gain insights
Improve the job
How Libera Works
Piece By Piece
Libera collects the same information that the delivery platforms collect on you. Information like location, speed, and time.
Fill The Gaps
Answer in-the-moment questions during your shift, regarding what is happening, what you think and how you feel, via notifications with quick yes/no or one-click responses. This fills in the information gaps.
Strength In Numbers
Aggregate your data with other riders. See how many other riders are out, the type and frequency of orders they are getting, the time they spend waiting, and how much they are earning relative to you.
Get In The Know
View insights you wouldn’t get from just your own data, like whether the frequency or cost of orders has been reducing over time. These are the insights Deliveroo use to perfect their algorithm and maximise profitability.
Sharing Is Caring
Share the insights with other riders, and the world. Start a conversation and organise with your colleagues.
Fight For Your Rights
Then use these insights to fight for better pay and conditions for you and your fellow riders. The insights are shared with independent worker unions in order to shape policy to better suit you.
TODAY
Precarious Work In The
Gig Economy
TOMORROW
Towards Insecurity
As delivery platforms grow, riders feel they are pedalling more to earn less, but they don’t have access to the bigger picture as the platforms are aggressively secretive about their data.
Riders don't know how their pay is determined. They don't know how they are rated, and therefore don’t know why their contract might be terminated. Platforms reject work or “deactivate” workers if their ratings fall below a certain threshold, and such rejections and deactivations are often algorithmically managed.
Platform workers are on a trajectory that will likely further strip them of acquired labour rights, unless mobilised into collective action on a global scale. The intermediary technology, designed by the employer to not only manage labour but shape perception of the work, does a disservice to delivery riders by manipulating opinions about the conditions of their employment. Governments must set out a vision of what good work looks like, so that technology is leveraged to provide workers with a better standard of living.
ENTREGADORES NA IRLANDA
Delivery Riders In Ireland
The protagonist of this project is the migrant Precariat, the denizen of wealthy countries, a low-wage disposable labour supply, and the villain of the Brexit campaign and other populist nativist movements. Many migrants enter the gig economy because of fewer opportunities in traditional employment due to language or visa restraints.
A large percentage of all delivery riders in Ireland are non-EU migrants, only qualifying for Stamp 2 Visas which entitles them to work just 20 hours a week. It also does not allow them to work as self-employed, which is the basis of the contract with companies like Deliveroo and this means that they have to rent accounts from official holders for, on average, €50 a week. This also means they are working under someone else's name and not covered by insurance if they are robbed, assaulted or involved in an accident.
RESEARCH
Key Findings
Many platform delivery riders track their own data using Strava or a cyclometer. This allows them to calculate how much they earn per hour of labour.
This means they can compare their earnings against the minimum wage, and see the energy they are using during certain times.
However, they cannot aggregate and cross reference their data with any other rider’s, to gain better insights.
New paradigms for unions are gaining momentum, and platform workers are organising across a wide range of platforms online.
Personal data can be used to answer questions about one’s own work and pay. For example, it could be used to calculate whether delivery fees per km travelled have changed over time.
““We should be getting that information from the platforms, since there are a lot of people who go out working and have no idea how long or how hard they cycled.” ”
PERSONA
Defining The User
Luis Costa
Delivery rider | Dublin
““I use Strava to get all the information about how many hours I’ve been out and how many kilometers I’ve cycled.””
STORYBOARD
User Centred Development
USER TESTING
Lo-fi Prototype
As this would be an unmonitored test, it was imperative that I recruit riders willing to take time out of their shift to test the app and record their own progress and feedback.
I made a sign-up sheet in Portuguese to recruit test subjects.
MID-FI PROTOTYPE
Refining The Fidelity
I then moved to Microsoft Powerapps to build a more functional prototype that could send push notifications and require less app switching. The trade-off, however, was that I had much less control over the design of the interface.
HI-FI PROTOTYPE
Remote Testing
“I aim to encourage greater pressure from the design community towards platforms who, through design, exert control over workers by misrepresenting the system they are working within. ”