WE’RE ELECTRIC
Case Study Diary:
Creating the mobile experience for a greener car-hire service
The is the case study of a project started as the coursework for my Professional Diploma in UX Design. Course provider The UX Design Institute acted as a client who was coming to me to develop the mobile experience for a new car-hire service.
The research process soon revealed a compelling real-world business opportunity which the diploma coursework gave me an opportunity to explore.
Orientation
Project Planning
I set out to use an economic UX Design research process for this project because I was working solo and did not have access to a corporate R&D budget.
User research would include internet-based competitive benchmarking, and recorded interviews each combining a depth interview with a comparative user test of two existing solutions in the market.
Analysis would be a gap analysis from the benchmarking, an affinity diagram created from synthesised highlights of the interviews (new interviews and some existing ones already provided to me by the client) and a customer journey map drawing on these resources.
Design: the final steps would be to map the user flow of the new car-hire solution for mobile, sketch the interaction design, refine these into wireframes with annotations describing the interactions and finally create a prototype that could be tested by target users.
At that point I would be handing the product back to the client. I therefore followed a waterfall hand-off process: wireframe annotations would need to be comprehensive in order to fully inform any downstream testers of the prototype and the developers of the service.
Do fewer people actually drive these days?
(data from orientation session)
Chart shows a decline in young people driving
Compared with period 1975-2000 (left chart) there is a significantly lower percentage of 17-29 year-old adults holding a full car Driving Licence in England in 2017-2022 (right chart)
Data from National Travel Survey (UK) 2022
Orientation - Steps
Like all great researchers, I turned to Google for some initial research to broadly orientate myself around the topic of car hire.
A ‘Quick’ Google
Ideas, observations and hypotheses about car-hire services arose from my browsing and guided my choices about how to focus my formal research.
It had already occurred to me before I’d begun that attitudes and priorities in travel may be changing post-pandemic. A climate conscious attitude might even be influencing people to opt for public transport over driving themselves, for example.
If that were true, might the same people choose to drive instead, if there were a service that’s genuninely ‘green’.
From my subsequent browsing, it was clear that the existing market certainly seemed well served and a unique differentiator of some kind would be important to ensure adoption of a new service.
I was also aware I had bias about this domain because of a personal interest in helping our environment, or at the very least, not going out of my way to do it harm. Since climate change is a globally shared human problem, I didn’t dismiss the possibility of making this into a green project just because this wasn’t part of the client’s brief.
I also knew from my training that there can be a significant economy for all stakeholders in designing for a very specific market. This ‘paradox of specificity’ could benefit the client’s bottom line more than a generic service based on good UX alone.
Therefore, although very subjective, the hunch that there may be a commercial opportunity in making a green car-hire service seemed to me an itch worth scratching.
Known Knowns
I had heard about range limitations and lack of sufficient charging locations causing friction in market uptake of Electric Vehicles (EVs). This was validated to some extent as I browsed, but it was also evident that there was constant improvement in EV technology and that leaders like Tesla were reaching parity with fuel cars in many areas.
Because of the mental models created by these known barriers, I considered that there still might not be strong enough demand from the general public for commercial providers for the providers to divert their resource to launching an all-electric service. After all most major services already had some electric car options.
But demand looked set to increase in the near future as EV range and infrastructure clearly continued to improve. (I therefore became interested in whether or not other car transport services - e.g. ride-sharing - were looking at electric vehicles as a means to gain market share at this unique point in time.)
As a result of the quickly evolving industry, I set out to look also at a broad range of car transportation services for competitive analysis.
I included ride-sharing services in this also because there seemed to be a possibility that younger travellers could get around most destinations fairly economically using a service like Uber because of its familiarity, relatively good value compared with normal taxi services - especially when travelling in groups - and because it offers the convenience of freedom over the responsibility of looking after a hire car. As such, ride-sharing could represent genuine competition for a new car-hire service.
The innate draw of a car is in its enabling the driver to be directly determining where they are going, with all associated benefits like enabling impromptu changes of plan that public transport can’t offer, or visiting exciting locations too expensive for a round trip in a taxi.
An electric hire service with the right features that allows this younger demographic to drive themselves, could attract both existing car hirers and those who currently prefer ride-sharing.
Questions
Right now, the price of hiring cars and prospect of damaging the environment might be creating an aversion not just to the young, but anyone who would otherwise welcome a convenient and private alternative to public transport. This speculation also invited a question: do fewer people actually drive these days?
If so, perhaps a new hire service is ill-advised at all. Or would such a downward trend signify a new market opportunity that might be lost to the car rental market currently but could be activated if it were greener?
I found a UK national survey that showed driving licence uptake has indeed trended down per capita among young people since 1989 and made a quick Excel visualisation of the raw data (see bar-chart).
For adoption of any new service to happen in a cluttered market, it would certainly need to be one that not only meets market benchmarks for quality but also meets the needs of those who seek green alternatives to motoring (and to do that better than all other transport options).