Overview

Hiyacar - the "Airbnb of car sharing" - is a peer-to-peer car rental service, which has over 60,000 members and 10,000 bookings in London alone. To help secure a vital round of funding, I was asked to redesign and improve the end-to-end process of booking a car. Over the following three months, I conducted user testing sessions and workshops as part of a small design team, consequently implementing designs which increased Hiyacar’s bookings by 10%.
Process

Initially, I conducted a comprehensive UX audit of the existing booking process to understand what worked, and what didn’t work. To better empathise with Hiyacar’s users, I also spent five days responding to queries and complaints using the Live Chat support system, which formed the basis for personas and empathy maps. Two problem areas quickly became apparent: “It takes too long to see available cars” and “Owners take too long to respond to my booking requests”.
"It takes too long to see available cars"

Previously, performing a search to view available cars took, on average, 8 clicks. Instead, I suggested promoting a variety of cars as soon as the homepage or app is opened. To explore this approach, I ran ten usability testing sessions which consisted of open-ended tasks, co-creative activities, and card sorting exercises. It became clear that, when deciding to book, a car’s price, location, and rating were the most significant factors. Therefore, I recommended that we bring personalised vehicles to the fore, categorised clearly by price, location and rating without having to search.
"Owners take too long to respond to my booking requests"

One of the most significant issues facing Hiyacar - and its users - was inactive accounts. For many cars available on the platform, their owners had not been online for over a year, resulting in many cars being requested over and over again with no response. For a potential driver, this was hugely frustrating, and would render the service unusable. 
To alleviate this issue, the design team implemented a “responsiveness” initiative. Car listings with over six months of inactivity would be temporarily removed, and car owners with a response time of less than forty-five minutes would be bumped up in search results with a “Responds Quickly” tag. Furthermore, for each listing, I created new assets in the design system to show when the owner's average response time, what percentage of requests they’ve accepted, and how many successful rentals they’ve had.
Results

Once implemented, these changes increased Hiyacar’s bookings, on average, by 10%. Users were now empowered to find affordable, close, and highly rated cars with responsive and engaged owners. This was a huge win for Hiyacar’s UX, but also for the company as a whole, by reassuring investors and securing further funding. Not only this, but the burden placed on the Live Chat support team was greatly reduced.
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