Mobile reservation

Enabling Ford customers to schedule online services in app.

01. Overview

Ford’s business problem

  • Fragmented: each dealership uses different tech ecosystem. It’s hard to provide consistent experience for customers and difficult to coordinate between dealers.

  • Only 9% of appointments are scheduled online. Only 58% of dealerships have online booking.

  • Customers are frustrated: they don’t trust their online reservations will be honored due to the above issues.

What I did

  1. UX strategy

  2. UI ideation & iteration

  3. Stakeholder presentations

HMW make mobile service reservation easy, trustworthy, and transparent?

My team: 3 designers, 1 researcher, 3 PMs, 2+ engineers

Timeline: Nov 21 – Mar 22

02. Discovery

Current experience audit – “a web stuffed into mobile”

Competitor analysis

I looked at 6 solutions and set direction on the design:

  • we should look to Tesla and BMW for their simple interface, copywriting, and intelligent experience that requires minimum input from users.

  • Avoid cluttered and dense UI with a ton of information like Ford and Subaru. On average, they need more than 6 steps and feel overwhelming.

After the analysis, I noted down some questions I wanted to explore further:

  • how do we balance between educating users without being information-dense?

  • Is a step-by-step process necessary? 

Design philosphy

1️⃣ Simplify: by hiding complexity of internal processes and technical language

2️⃣ Customer first: the system should know the customer information and make intelligent recommendations.

3️⃣ Start small: then make bigger bets. We’re making an MVP and we may not get everything right at the first try.

Defining a reservation flow

All reservations follow these steps:

  1. Select a service

  2. Find an appointment location, date, time

  3. Confirm.

In what order to we present the appointment search parameters?

Do we combine some of them?

Exploring linear flow

You have been driving Ford for a while. You see a vehicle health alert, notifying you service is needed. Then you pick location, because it's not likely to change during the course of booking. Afterwards, the "service type" screen explains each service method. And lastly, you can filter date and time preferences and choose a time slot.

This flow asks for input each step and doesn’t make any predictions. 

  • Pro: decreased mental load on each step because each decision point is paced out. 

  • Con: if user wants to change previous input, they need to go back (multiple) screens. 

Our team, however, was trying to incorporate ideas like intelligent predictions to make our solution really "reimagined" and innovative, so I also explored another direction.

Exploring a 1-step flow

There are some users who tend to stick with similar times and dealerships, why don't we shorten the flow for them by predicting their preferences? 

03. Research

How do people make reservations?

We did 32 interviews with Ford owners: exploratory discussion + guided discussion with stimulus.

Here are the key insights we learned from users related to "flow". 

👩‍🔧 "Preferred dealer" does play a heavy part in choosing among dealers, but users are willing to explore 

📰 Users want more details, especially on service type, cost, etc., the things they're likely to be unfamiliar with

➡️ Users prefer the step-by-step flow because it reduces confusion. They only want certain things to be pre-filled.

👀 Users want filters to be clearly labeled, putting everything into 1 button labeled as "filter" was not intuitive or effective.

Balance 1-step and linear flow

From user research, we got clear answer that our assumption that simplicity = less steps and less filters was a bit misguided. Users want a balance of guided linear flow with details clearly explained to them and some intelligence to predict and suggest.

04. Design

Impact