Pain points and opportunities in connected car market

It is well-known that consumers lack trust in car dealerships and are annoyed by all the marketing emails and calls. Dealerships need a better way to identify potential leads for vehicle servicing and a more trustworthy way to engage with their customers. How might we increase consumer’s trust on dealerships? What if we provide a transparent and intuitive consumer-facing application to explain what is happening under the hood for the consumers? What if dealerships have a tool to understand their customers better with vehicle data?

After collaborating with dealership networks, we are trying to solve this pain point by introducing a connected car platform. By adding a small hardware piece into the car, both consumers and car dealerships are able to get data from the car. With a consumer-facing mobile app, the consumers are able to view their car conditions and get recommendation on how to improve car performance and driving skills. With a web portal, the dealerships are able to view their customers’ car conditions and provide predictive maintenance for their consumers.

Timeline and scope of project

It all started from an urgent client request in the startup environment. As solo product designer, I needed to finish the whole design process in a month, including defining requirements, wireframing, communication with clients and delivering final outcome. I collaborated with sales managers, clients and developers closely during this design sprint.

After the MVP, there was a 6-month pilot with local dealerships to understand how users react to the product. We needed to iterate the product with the feedback that we gathered from pilot and launch the first version for our European client in a year.

The design sprint

Together with our sales manager and PM, I organized workshops with stakeholders from our client to understand their business objectives. I translated the requirements into wireframes on whiteboard, communicated with stakeholders to make sure it was what they wanted, and collaborated with our developers to understand what was feasible in terms of the aggressive timeline.

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MVP version of consumer mobile app

The consumer app needs to cover 4 basic use cases:

  • View car conditions and alerts.
  • Check diagnostic information.
  • Contact dealerships nearby when there is issues coming up with the car.
  • View trips and driving behaviors.

Creating visual identity for Continental software

MVP version is used for pilots and demos, not client-specific. So our product team decided to have our own visual identity for MVP, which means, I had to create visual identity for Continental software from scratch.

Continental is a huge traditional automotive corporation, and never had any consumer-facing software products. Thus, I needed to extend the brand from only print design to UI design. To create a light and cheerful look and feel, I kept some of Continental’s main brand colors, orange and white, and used more readable Roboto font family to pair with Continental Stag. Black and silver look too mechanical-ish, so I chose not to use them to get the consumer-friendly look.

MVP version of dealer web portal

The main use case of dealership web portal is to view what cars are having what issues, so that the dealership admin is able to gain accurate leads and encourage those consumers to come in and fix their cars. By gaining massive data of the car, the potential use case is to show the dealerships what kind of problems happen frequently on what kind of cars, in order to help dealerships manage their part inventory and predict servicing targets.

Biggest takeaways from pilot

Most consumers don’t have a general sense of the car conditions, if there are no obvious problems that they perceive.

Car dealerships love this tool which can help them accurately follow up with their consumers. There is a huge increase on retention rate of their customers.

Iterating from MVP

Various dealership network companies showed huge interests on the product, including a German auto shop, Vergoelst. They requested a consumer mobile app design with their existing branding. Right is the iOS app they currently have. The user experience is not optimized, and the visual style is dated. I decided to keep their main visual identity, and iterate their current design.

Based on insights I got from pilot, I explored different visual styles to show the client for them to better decide what represents their brand best.

After communicating with Vergoelst, I understood that they do like to keep the dark background to maintain the automotive style. So I iterated based on the second design, and made their accent color, yellow pop more. Below is the final design of consumer app for Vergoelst.

One of the biggest takeaways from pilots is that only a small portion of consumers who have older cars, or who are naturally car lovers understand and care about car conditions and cheaper maintenance; most consumers who have newer cars don’t care that much about their cars, just because they are not in a hurry to sell their car, and their dealership will remind them about maintenance schedules all the time. Another thing all consumers share in common is: everyone loves coupons. Based on these insights, our PMs and I modified the needs and features, and I came up with another round of iteration.

The additional use cases we identified with the client are:

  • Automatic service maintenance reminder.
  • Browsing coupons.
  • Giving out driving tips.

Customer Success

We got 7 more clients within 2 months after we launched the product, and tons of interest at different trade shows. At CES, one of the biggest well-known car manufacturers in the world actually noticed the clean nice design, and asked if the designer is willing to customize the platform to fill their needs.

Reflection and Learning

One of the biggest challenges is to design with hardware limitations and cost in mind. To maintain low cost of network communication between the server and in-car hardware, car data won’t be real time. For example, diagnostics information will only refresh automatically every other minute. For most use cases, it’s acceptable; but for consumers who want to view the status right after they have some work done on the car, there can be a one-minute delay. My solution to this problem is that if the consumer wants to look at real-time data, they are able to manually tap the refresh button. After the launch, we didn’t really see too many consumers pushing the refresh button; some told us that they only did it because they would like to see the scanning animation while waiting to retrieve the data. So it seems that this wouldn’t be a concern for too many consumers.

Another lesson I learned is to use any resources available to conduct user research. A large-scale pilot with all stakeholders involved takes long preparation, but our product development process couldn’t wait. Alternative 1 that our PM and I tried is to partner with local dealership businesses, provide the solution for free for 2 months and gather data and insights. Alternative 2 is to get support from our CEO and have him convince our fellow business units to have our internal employees participate in user testing with some incentives like Amazon gift cards. Both small-scale pilots went well, and provided us with insights to make decisions.