Oscar
2023
UX/UI design
responsive web
mobile app
new feature
In today's dynamic automotive landscape, Oscar Car Rental endeavors to stay ahead of the curve by introducing a car subscription feature alongside its traditional rental services.
My aim as the UX designer for this project is to create user-friendly digital experiences that transform how customers engage with Oscar's services, while simplifying operations for location owners with intuitive backend solutions.
MY ROLE
As the UX designer for Oscar's car subscription feature, my role involved conducting user research, designing intuitive interfaces for both the customer website and back-office mobile app, creating wireframes and prototypes, collaborating with the development team, and overseeing the implementation and testing phases.
Exploration and Insight Gathering:
Analyze competitor offerings and market trends to identify opportunities for differentiation and areas of improvement. This phase sets the foundation for informed decision-making throughout the design process.
Generate a wide range of design concepts and ideas, exploring innovative approaches to address user needs and differentiate the car subscription feature from traditional rental services.
Innovation and Idea Generation
Translate chosen design concepts into detailed, high-fidelity prototypes and mockups, ensuring alignment with user requirements and project objectives. Work closely with developers to bring designs to life, leveraging best practices in user interface design and front-end development to create intuitive and engaging user experiences.
Crafting and Implementation
Monitor user engagement metrics and gather qualitative feedback post-launch, iterating on the design as needed to address emerging user needs and improve overall user satisfaction. This ongoing optimization process ensures the feature continues to evolve and remain competitive in the market.
Refinement and Enhancement
I developed designs and presented them to gain approval from partners, and various teams during the project's lifecycle.
Launch and Evolution
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THE CHALLANGE
Challenge: Communicating differences between traditional rental and car subscription models. Users may be more familiar with rental services, less so with subscriptions.
Benefits: Flexibility, convenience, cost-saving potential.
Aim: Showcase value and encourage exploration of car subscriptions.
Communicating the Benefits of Subscription
Challenge: Simplifying long-term commitments and legal processes for car subscriptions. Subscriptions often extend over months or years, requiring extensive information and legal navigation.
Aim: Streamline and simplify procedures for users. Minimize friction and ensure a smooth signup process.
Approach: Provide clear guidance, intuitive interfaces, and transparent communication.
Objective: Guide users effortlessly through necessary steps, building trust in the subscription service.
Simplifying Legal Processes of Commitment
One of the main challenges was designing a seamless user experience that catered to both car subscription and traditional rental services. Additionally, ensuring the interface was user-friendly for both customers and location owners posed a challenge.
“We are prepared to tackle any challenge as our project caters to both location owners and customers, ensuring a comprehensive solution for all stakeholders”
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Through user research, we discovered that customers were increasingly interested in flexible car subscription options that provided convenience and affordability. Location owners expressed a need for a simplified back-office app to manage subscriptions efficiently.
Customer Insights
THE DISCOVERY
Transparent pricing
Easy car subscription
Users expect a transparent pricing to trust the company for a long term rental. Also to stand out from the competitors, we should have transparent pricing with clear deposit rules, insurances, discounts, extras and add-ons and a clear cancellation policy.
The long term rental program is difficult to understand for users. There is a huge potential in the market. This way, we can lead more users to car rental option. Overall, better utilization espacially for high season.
Easy booking process
We should optimize the booking process to reduce the response time. Booking process steps should be clear, add-ons and extras should be explained well. Receipts that shows the pricing details should be detailed and clear.
Deeper Insights
Better utilization on B2B side will lead to more cars on the website, as locations get more cars. Locations can rent their cars for rental or subscription. It develop business relationship with companies
Verified customers are the painpoint of all locations with the current process. By verifying B2B customers, locations can give more credits on invoices. We can collabrate with verification tools to make this happen.
B2B membership
Fast user verification
Increase customer satisfaction
Ensure legal compliance
Drive business growth
Improve fleet management
Simplify car subscription process
Having a Reliable Process
for Both Sides of the Business
THE VISION
In order to ensure smooth operations and satisfaction for all stakeholders, it's essential to establish a reliable process that caters to the needs of both sides. By creating a system that is efficient, transparent, and responsive, we can build trust and facilitate seamless interactions between customers and location owners. This approach fosters positive experiences and fosters long-term relationships, driving success for everyone involved.
“Our aim is to instill trust in everyone through the new version of car rental process”
Introducing Oscar
THE SERVICE
The customer website offered a streamlined sign-up and booking process for car subscriptions, with clear pricing tiers, insurances and vehicle options.
User-friendly and Transparent
Customer Interface
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We aim to smoothly onboard customers to this new type of car rental by providing clear instructions and seamless experiences. Our goal is to ensure that users feel comfortable and confident navigating the process from start to finish.
Introducing Customers to This
Innovative Car Rental Model
The back-office website and mobile app for location owners featured functionalities for managing subscriptions, monitoring vehicle availability, and handling customer inquiries.
Organization for Location Owners
to Manage Bookings Seamlessly
How do we ensure the collaboration of all?
THE FRAMEWORK
The design framework focused on simplicity, accessibility, and consistency across platforms.
How to streamline subscription services integration?
1
How to simplify the documentation&booking process?
2
How to enhance user experience for locations?
3
In the project's inception, understanding the multifaceted needs of architects and non-architects was paramount. I developed the 'spectrums and situations' framework to navigate these complexities, ensuring a user-centric approach.
By applying design principles and employing a systematic framework for content prioritization, I fostered transparency in decision-making and fostered alignment across the team toward our common objectives.
Taking Users to the New Era
By establishing clear communication channels between the development teams working on both platforms and conducting regular cross-platform testing to identify and address any integration issues.
We can simplify the car subscription signup process by implementing a user-friendly interface with clear instructions, minimizing the number of required documents, and providing helpful tooltips or guides throughout the process.
We can develop a comprehensive tracking system within the backoffice mobile app that allows location owners to easily monitor both rental and subscription transactions, automate documentation management, and generate detailed reports for analysis.
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Easy Onboarding - Easy Process
To streamline the complex process of long-term car subscriptions while effectively explaining the differences between traditional rentals and subscriptions to users. The solution lies in creating clear and concise messaging that highlights the unique benefits of subscriptions, such as flexibility and cost savings, compared to traditional rentals.
Additionally, simplifying the subscription signup process through intuitive interfaces and transparent communication will help minimize friction and make the experience seamless for users.
By refining the search parameters to specifically highlight subscription offerings, users can effortlessly explore and select from a curated list of available subscription vehicles, enhancing their overall browsing experience and expediting the process of finding the ideal car subscription.
User Flow: Car Subscription Feature
In implementing the car subscription feature for users, we've established a clear and intuitive flow to facilitate their journey. Users begin by learning about the car subscription service and its benefits before browsing through a dedicated search page designed specifically for car subscription vehicles. Once they've found their desired subscription, they seamlessly proceed through the booking process, complete payment and deposit transactions, and finally receive confirmation of their subscription booking.
Back-Office Management: Car Subscription
On the back-office side for location owners, we've implemented distinct separations to effectively manage both rental and subscription services. Owners can define the vehicles eligible for the subscription program and select the appropriate booking type (rental or subscription) when creating a booking. Additionally, our calendar interface distinguishes between rental and subscription bookings, allowing owners to efficiently track and manage reservations for both types of services.
Car Subscription Separation on the Backoffice of Locations:
Define Subscription Program Cars: Location owners define vehicles eligible for the subscription program.
Select Booking Type: Location owners choose the booking type (rental or subscription) when creating a booking.
Different Rental Types: The calendar interface distinguishes between rental and subscription bookings, ensuring clarity and effective management of both types of reservations.
Oscar Car Subscription upholds stringent standards in delivering exceptional user experiences, prioritizing clarity, and ease of use. This ethos underscores a meticulous approach, emphasizing accountability, attention to detail, and comprehensive documentation.
Throughout each phase of feature development, I followed a systematic process, beginning with thorough requirement gathering, fostering consensus among stakeholders, and obtaining necessary approvals. Detailed specifications were meticulously crafted to guide the design process, ensuring alignment with project goals.
My methodology involved extensive brainstorming sessions to conceptualize ideas and map out intuitive workflows. These concepts were then translated into high-fidelity design compositions, leveraging established design patterns for seamless integration into the final product.
DETAILED DESIGN
Communicating Design
In the subsequent phase, I meticulously segmented the design compositions and integrated them into a comprehensive prototype using Figma. Initially, my focus was on capturing the essence of the design's critical aspects. As the project evolved, I dedicated attention to fine-tuning micro-interactions to enhance user experience.
Prototyping emerged as a pivotal tool for soliciting feedback from the team and obtaining approvals. Leveraging the flexibility of Figma, I seamlessly shared prototypes as interactive links, facilitating usability testing and iterative refinement of the product.
Information architecture of the process
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time to analyze recordings
from 150 users
“I think there are too many steps and blank spaces to fill out, I can't estimate how long it will take.”
Users want to be able to edit their search on the results page.
The process is easy for them but a bit time-consuming.
They want to know which steps are legally most important.
Based on these findings, we will implement a feature that allows users to edit their search directly from the results page, improving their overall search experience. Additionally, we'll work on streamlining the process to make it more efficient, addressing the time-consuming aspect highlighted by users. Furthermore, we'll provide clear guidance on the legal aspects of the process, highlighting the most important steps to ensure users understand their legal obligations.
Throughout this project, I crafted four comprehensive documentation sets to convey the project requirements to the engineering team and assist our QA teams in crafting effective test cases. These included the CX Spec, detailing the project requirements, and the Visual Design Spec & Keylines, outlining the design system.
Managing and updating this paperwork posed significant challenges during the project, requiring constant revisions to keep pace with evolving project needs. Additionally, I explored various strategies and created supplementary documentation to elucidate animation and timing intricacies for our micro-interactions.
Detailed Specs
IMPLEMENTATION
search results page
homepage
booking process
Bringing It All To Life
The gallery below shows some of the designs
location backoffice
At the outset of our soft launch, we introduced Oscar's car subscription feature across web and mobile platforms. The rollout proceeded smoothly, marking a significant milestone in our journey. Despite the complexities involved in introducing a new service model and the inherent challenges of an MVP launch, the process unfolded seamlessly. This successful debut underscores our team's dedication and meticulous planning, highlighting our commitment to delivering innovative solutions to our users.
Soft-start with MVP
THE LAUNCH
We ran an A/B/C test to find the best call-to-action (CTA) button text for a booking platform, with three options:
1. "Book now",
2. "Choose vehicle",
3. "Continue".
Test Scope
The test ran for one month across two markets, Denmark (DK) and the Netherlands (NL).
Success was measured by:
-Conversion rate – the percentage of users who completed a booking.
-Proceed-to-checkout rate – the percentage of users who clicked the button and moved to the next step (/step2).
-The primary goal was to improve the proceed-to-checkout rate, anticipating that it could reduce customer service inquiries by providing more information within the platform.
Results and Conclusion:
Using Google Optimize, we found that the "Continue" option had the best proceed-to-checkout rate. This led us to conclude that renaming the button to "Continue" was the most effective choice, guiding more users through the booking process while potentially reducing customer service workload.
A/B Testing for Button Text on Booking Form
THE EVOLUTION
Context:
Oscar proposed hiding the vehicle year from the frontend to increase the conversion rate. A similar approach had shown promising results previously. The goal was to test this idea more broadly in the Spanish (ES) market while retaining all car information, except for the year.
Test Parameters:
Markets: Spain (ES)
Split: 50/50
Duration: 4-8 weeks, with a check-in after 2 weeks
Changes: Hide vehicle year from all frontend displays, including car boxes, car information, and filters. Measure customer service (CS) complaints to gauge any negative impact.
Results:
The experiment ran from March 10, 2023, to April 28, 2023, in the ES market. Key outcomes were:
- Conversion rate: 0.74% with the year hidden and 0.68% with the year shown
- Probability: A 79% chance that hiding the year is the optimal configuration
- Modelled improvement: Between -20% and +66%
There was no day during the experiment where showing the year had a better conversion rate than hiding it. Although the increase wasn't dramatic, it was consistently better when the year was hidden.
In a meeting on April 28, 2023, the team agreed to hide the vehicle year across all markets based on these results.
A/B Test for Hiding Vehicle Year
These changes had a significantly positive impact on the user experience. By categorizing the booking form inputs and removing unnecessary steps, we made the process more intuitive and efficient for users. Users now find it easier to navigate through the booking process and input their information, resulting in a smoother and more satisfying experience overall.
“We decided not to overwhelm users."
From this project, I learned the importance of adapting to user needs and preferences to enhance the overall user experience. It's crucial to simplify complex processes, streamline navigation, and prioritize transparency to ensure user satisfaction and engagement. Additionally, I gained valuable insights into the significance of iterative design and continuous improvement, as well as the effectiveness of leveraging user feedback to drive product enhancements and optimizations.
What I Learned:
Prioritizing Iterative Improvement
REFLECTIONS
ArchiVinci AI
ux/ui design │ website│web app │generative AI integration
DropYourAI
ux/ui design │ website │ branding │ AI integration
Oscar Car Rental
new feature │ redesign website │ mobile app │ user testing
Furniture Shop App
ux/ui design │ mobille app │ AR/VR design │AR integration