Avis Car Hire.
Native first mobile app design centred around improving the rental experience for Avis car hire customers, focusing on self-serve of locating, pick-up and drop-off vehicles to reduce valuable waiting times in potential stressful situations such as a late arrival of your flight.
User ResearchUI designMobile AppOur approach
Our focus was to continue the redesign of the Avis website and translate that to their mobile iOS and Android app.
Avis had already established a robust pattern library enabling us to really focus on the users pain points of car hire.
Joining Avis brought back a lot of memories for us as we had a chance to work with some familiar face Frazer Cooper was now UX manager, we had previously worked together at Three and was great to work with him again and the small but close team.
Our toolkit.
User research.
We wanted to get to the real pain points of hiring a car and decided to spend a few days at the busiest branch in the UK for Avis at their Heathrow station.
Design system.
As a whole Avis had a great development design system but lacked the assets for their designers to use. This unfortunately had led to bespoke and inconsistent approaches by current and previous designers, a solution was needed to draw a line in the sand.
Rapid prototyping.
In order to validate our hypothesis we used high fidelity prototypes to test flows and observe friction points, including terminology mis match from users mental models.
A deep dive.
Project – Onboarding, Hiring and returning a vehicle
Role – Lead Product Designer
Jun 2018 - Dec 2018
Opportunity
With the redesign in full swing it was a chance for us to improve the self-serve pick-up and drop-off functionality.
Impact
Users can now effectively self-serve when using the Avis app and skip the queues reducing impact on the Avis centre staff.
Pain points identified.
The app had been audited and baseline testing undertaken by Fool Proof on the 9-10th May 2018 “Avis App Research Cycle 1”. A number of outcomes and recommendations had been proposed.
Working closely with the Product Owner Johan Vorster we refined and prioritised the recommendations made by the original research.
The insights gathered showed that logged in customers had a higher value to the business and overall more hires than more casual users.
Onboarding.
Although common practice now, at the time Avis did not have any onboarding experience for their app. This is a perfect opportunity to explain to users the benefits of registering and the free Avis Preferred tier that gave users access to self-serve functionality and loyalty schemes.
Calendar.
After a short dig through analytics supplied from Appsee we confirmed that almost 45% of users drop off before triggering calendar select drop off, and supporting videos confirmed customers struggling and failing to get to the search results page due to the calendar interaction.
Homepage.
Customers had no personalised homepage regardless of registering or not. To improve the uptake in logged in users we created dynamic homepages that would show personalised information such as your live rentals or encourage the user to log in.
Calendar drop off.
45% of users drop off before triggering the drop-off calendar.
We reviewed the videos and found some users would take up to two minutes to select their pick-up and drop-off dates. Others thought they were adjusting their return date and only realised their mistake after seeing the error pop-up message on submit.
After further analysis of the footage we narrowed down the culprit of this frustration; the calendar was resetting users inputs if they decided to change their mind or edit a date. We were trying too hard. Things could be simplified easily to ensure users are less prone to errors.
The good news, we had already solved the problem.
As you’d expect this error was causing a huge drop-off in conversion so needed a quick resolution. In order to gain confidence in a design early we looked internally to see if we had already solved this problem. We had.
A short search through the analytics of the mobile site showed that that calendar was not suffering from the same pain point as the app and with some small tweaks was the chosen calendar interaction.
Our solution.
In this short video you can see the interaction of the new UI with a cleaner palette tone relying heavily on Apple app guidelines we utilised the header, interactions and animations from iOS.
By utilising these assets we saved not only time and effort but the users felt as if they knew how to use the calendars already. It was intuitive to them and familiar.
As you can by not auto selecting anything for the user each action is predictable and expected, for advanced users they could tap between the return dates and pick-up but each date was separate avoiding an awkward rest moment we had seen before.