Role
UX Designer
Industry
Transport
Date
2018
Hiyacar
Hiyacar - the "Airbnb of car sharing" - is a peer-to-peer car rental service. To help secure a vital round of funding, I was asked to redesign and improve the end-to-end process of booking a car. I led user research and design ideation workshops, and subsequently delivered an overhauled booking process which increased Hiyacar’s conversion by 25%.
Process
To identify areas of improvement, I conducted an end-to-end UX audit of the existing booking process.
This involved creating a comprehensive user journey diagram, identifying pain points and inefficiencies by drawing on UX best practices and usability heuristics.
To better empathise with Hiyacar’s users, I responded to queries and complaints using the Live Chat support system, which formed the basis for personas and empathy maps.
Two common issues became apparent: “It takes too long to see available cars” and “Owners take too long to respond to my booking requests”.
Challenges
Reducing the amount of time to see available cars.
The existing process required users to enter a location and select both pick-up and drop-off times before seeing any cars.
To explore a solution, I ran user research sessions which consisted of open-ended tasks and card sorting exercises. It became clear that, when deciding to book, a car’s price, location, and rating were the most significant factors to users. After assessing the app's data, I also identified that most users chose a pick-up time within an hour and with a booking duration of 1 day.
Drawing on these findings, I created a new home screen with cars immediately visible and sorted by price, location and rating, with the pick-up and drop-off times pre-selected as 1 hour and 24 hours respectively.
Challenges
Reducing the likelihood of contacting an unresponsive owner.
For many cars available on the platform, the owners had not been online for over a year, resulting in many users requesting cars with no response. This was hugely frustrating for users, rendering the product effectively unusable.
To alleviate this issue, we executed a “responsiveness” initiative. Car listings with over six months of inactivity would be temporarily removed, and owners with a response time of less than 45 minutes would be bumped up in search results with a “Responds Quickly” tag.
For each car listing, I created new assets in the design system to show the owner's average response time, their percentage of accepted requests, and their number of successful rentals.
Outcomes
By implementing the new home screen and responsiveness initiative, Hiyacar’s conversion increased by 25%.
Users were better able to find affordable, local, and highly rated cars with responsive and engaged owners in less time than ever. Furthermore, the number of complaints sent to the Live Chat support team was greatly reduced.
The project was a significant success for both the business and its users, reassuring investors and securing vital funding.
Feedback
Elis worked on the UX and UI on a number of key projects on our apps and site, being pro-active in speaking to our members to understand what mattered to them, collating the data for the team to get a clearer understanding of the project and applied these findings to his designs. Every time, he demonstrated a strong ability to analyse the data at his disposition to come up with the right solution.
Lead Designer
Elis is a brilliant UX (& UI!) designer. During his time at hiyacar, he led our whole user research processes and interviewed multiple members, as well as designed multiple new screens for the app & website. I feel like our app has improved tremendously since we've integrated his designs or improved existing ones based on his learnings from user interviews & research.
Head of Product