Sharing economy has been growing rapidly recently. In car sharing business, one of the biggest pain point is that the car owner and renter have to be both physically at the same place to hand over car keys. One solution Zipcar uses is to have a card access system, but it adds a big barrier to new user adoption.
What can we benefit car sharing company admins and consumers if there is Remote Virtual Key technology which enables vehicle access with an app?
One of our client is Flexdrive, an Atlanta-based car renting/sharing company. Currently, they don’t have a good tool to monitor the fleet, and manage the logistics. Due to this inconvenience, they have to have staff working at each lot locations to check in and check out vehicles, and transfer cars from lot A to lot B without data for planning ahead of time.
I designed this web app specifically to tackle these problems by visualizing lot heat map and predictive trends of renting. The app also allows admins to see which subscribers are driving the car carefully, which cars need maintenance, and which cars are better preferred and retain a better value.
As part of the holistic solution, consumer app is designed to meet all needs a car renter has during one rent cycle. As shown above, the renter is able to use the app to unlock the car at the time of appointment, monitor car health, send diagnostic report to roadside assistance, and finish manual inspections when turning in the car.
The solution brings convenience and peace of mind to consumers, and saves labor cost for fleet management companies.
I made sure that Flexdrive’s featured blue is kept across platforms, but I redesigned the app to make the interactions easier to navigate based on context, and more visually appealing.
Some clients specifically want the backend APIs so that they can do their own customized version of fleet management. In order to make it happen, our developers and I co-created this developer portal. To make the experience smooth, I make copy-paste features really easy, and use the step-by-step structure to walk the user through steps when creating certain features.
