cinch — car ownership: important dates
Shifting focus from purchasing to retaining customers — part 3.
Introduction
A feature that enables customers to view the important dates of their car admin, e.g., road tax, insurance, and MOT, is essential for those who do it annually and supports the wider cinch business of car ownership. Additionally, such a feature offers the opportunity to check in with customers to ensure they are happy with their car.
From the previous discovery, the research has already uncovered that many potential customers desire this feature, and it is already a functionality among industry players such as AutoTrader and Arnold Clark.
Design tennis
After reviewing competitors, my colleague and I utilised design tennis to exchange designs and progressed the solution forward via continuous iteration.
Usability testing
In collaboration with the research team, I validated low-fidelity wireframes using multiple rounds of testing, where I wrote test plans and analysed results to establish the following:
- Comprehension and AB preference of the card UIs
- Comprehension of adding and editing dates
- Expectations for push notification opt-in
- Comprehension of pausing updates (push notifications)
- MOT additional features
Comprehension and AB preference of the card UIs
A sample of the design tennis UIs got pulled for the first round of unmoderated testing. All participants comprehended the UIs and the majority preferred option B due to its greater visibility of dates and remaining days. Using this design preference, I then designed for the wider journey by adding important dates for further validation.
Comprehension of adding and editing dates
During user testing, participants expressed that they expected the ‘Add +’ action to enable the addition of important dates related to their car. They also suggested that clicking on each date card should allow editing. Additionally, participants indicated a desire for servicing with insurance and road tax, as well as the manual input of custom dates.
Expectations for push notification opt-in
Most participants preferred to opt-in by selecting the ‘Send me important updates’ button, while a few first accessed the settings cog. In addition, the participants requested the ability to customise the frequency and choose which essential dates they wanted to opt in or out of. Lastly, participants expected to set up notifications for SMS and email along with push notifications.
Comprehension of pausing updates (push notifications)
All participants understood that notifications would resume once the MOT had been automatically updated on the cinch backend.
“When I pause notifications, they stop, but they resume after the MOT is completed.”
MOT additional features
Participants were asked to rank potential features related to MOT by order of importance for future iterations of viewing important dates. The highly ranked features were MOT due date, validity, history (advisory, e.g., tyre wear), history (pass or failed), and history (failed items, e.g., fluid leak). These features received a mean average score of more than 4 out of 5.
Based on the feedback received from the participants, some additional features were requested. These included information about the garage that carried out the MOT, for example, Kwikfit, the average cost of replacement parts for advisories, tips for reducing running costs, and a list of recommended garages with the option to book an MOT.
Hi-fidelity design
Research informed the hi-fidelity designs and the brand team reviewed the proposed copy.
MVP
Please note that the MVP designs do not allow for custom important date additions, opt-ins for push notifications or MOT additional features.
