Providing value for drivers outside of the renewal cycle

The Challenge

A company that produces OBD2 Reader's approached us with a proposal to collaborate with us to create a meaningful experience for our customers using their technology. The OBD2 Reader was able to -

• Track the location of the car 
• Read the fuel levels 
• Obtain error codes and decode them. 
• Provide the customer with a score based on their driving. 
  

We were interested in the solution, but we had to make sure we fully understood the customer and their problems to see if a solution like this would be desirable.

From desk research, we identified that for every £10 earned, £1.90 goes towards keeping their cars running, increasing every year.  With this problem, we started to investigate this further and understand our customer's problems with car maintenance and help reduce the amount of money spent on maintaining the car throughout the year‍‍

Research 

At the outset of the project, it was good for everyone to identify what questions and assumptions we have about people and their car usage. 

This would help us identify and what we needed to get answered and how. 

With those established, our goals were - 

• Identify the standard process when something happens to their car?
• Identify what do customers do to save money on their car maintenance currently.
• Establish what the most common problems are with keeping their vehicle on the road.
• What are customer's attitudes towards using OBD2 Ports / Telematics? 

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Contextual Inquiry 

With the goals written, it was time to plan our research. First, we wrote our discussion guide and then started to recruit customers between the ages of 18 - 45.

• We carried out ten research sessions using Lookback
• We invited people across the business to sit in and take notes to be part of the process. 
  

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Research Findings

Top pain points

Almost all of the people we researched highlighted that taking their car to the garage for repair as the most significant pain point:

• It is hard to figure out the problem with the car without taking it to the garage.
• Customers felt that mechanics took advantage of their knowledge deficit. 
• Waiting to get the car diagnosed and quoted by the mechanic is considered a lengthy process. 
• People don't understand how to choose a mechanic for the job.
• Some users didn't know how to look after their car in between an MOT.

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Other research findings

• Fuel prices are the most common strategy for saving money on running their car.
• Remembering key dates such as Tax & MOT and insurance is a struggle when there are multiple cars in the household. 
• People were concerned with telematics data shared with insurers to put at a disadvantage, and they want to control that data, e.g. more expensive quotes.

This helped us focus on what the core proposition should be for the product, and that is helping customers take care of their car and help educate them to be prepared for when things go wrong and save them money in the process.

We believe that by providing consumers with access to their car data, we can help them become more successful drivers and lower the price of running the vehicle. Engaging the customer outside the insurance cycle will also open up a new channel for price comparison.

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Competitive Analysis

We investigated the landscape of the other applications that attempt to solve these common problems with maintaining your car. 

We identified that space was mainly comprised of apps that complemented a service such as insurance or breakdown cover. Car manufacturer's were also providing companion apps that mostly took a freemium approach to their functionality, and it would only work depending on the model of the car.

There seemed to be a potential to join some of the segregated functionality in one place and provide a car agnostic application that would help the customer manage their car and its maintenance.

Concept & Ideation

Firstly, we gathered our insights and formed them into needs to be then used in a needs mapping session, where we had the product team and senior leadership map their ideas against a user need. We then formulated some "how might we" statements off the back of that and carried out some crazy 8's for good measure.

Note - it got very messy

The output
The workshop aided us to group the ideas into themes, understand how the ecosystem might look, and formulate an initial feature set that we would use to create our design concepts and create a prototype.

Predictive maintenance
‍‍Spotting issues early and recommend what to do before it becomes too costly

Garage comparison 
Seeing upfront quotes and mechanic recommendations

Personalised insurance
Getting insurance that's tailored. Using car and driver behaviour to find the perfect match

Cheap petrol
Knowing where and when to fill up when the car is running low

Reduce petrol usage
‍Presenting driving behaviour and recommendations to reduce petrol usage and carbon emissions

Prototyping & Testing

While the project team were assessing its viability and feasibility, I was evaluating the desirability. 

So I first created a prototype that reflected the feature set defined quickly and got it in front of users to understand what feature's resonated with them the most and gather their initial thoughts. Then from that, we kept iterating till we felt the solution aligned with the customer's needs and problems. 

Alongside prototyping, we designed and built a website using Webflow that acted as a honeypot to recruit more users to test the product and quantify the product's desirability. We created a fake brand to avoid any bias towards the brand in our testing also, that's why it's called Drivrr.

Final Outcome

The outcome of this project led to us getting more funding to build the application and collaborate with the OBD2 Reader vendor. As a result, we launched an Alpha programme with real customers who are very engaged with helping everyone save money on their car costs. 

We're still continually talking to customers weekly to improve the product and to keep generating empathy. 

Project Takeaways and Reflection

1. You can never do too much research
This project was continuously talking to customers, learning more and more in every single session. You can never know too much, so if you can speak to customer's do it as much as you can. 

2. Reassure the customer that they're in control of their data
We had many customers express their worries and concerns about the driving data being shared with insurers. Data is like currency now, and they don't want you giving it away without their permission. 

3. Track your insights to make sure where your decisions came from
Insights change and develop over time, make sure you document them and keep track of them to make sure you're constantly referencing the correct insights in your design decisions. I'm now going to work with the customer research manager of GoCompare, to create an insight tracker for GoCompare.