Accessible Automotives

This Automotive business provides cars and powered wheelchair scooters (PWS) to disabled people, funded by the taxpayer. The scheme offers “worry-free motoring”, covering servicing, insurance, windscreen cover, tire repairs, and breakdown cover in addition to the car lease. They provide one in ten new cars - about 1000 per day on average. There are ~700k cars on the books & they are judged by the Customer Service Institute to offer the best customer service in the UK, bar none. Their Net Promoter Score is ~95%.

Challenge

Moving a business, worth over £2bn, off a legacy system and taking them on the journey to improve their processes and efficiency. They want to re-engineer the merchandising and order management processes used for selling vehicles online and build a new internal system for pricing analysts to value and price vehicles being sold.

The first milestone goal is replacing the existing support systems, and contributing to the decommissioning of the Enterprise database.

Art of the Possible

When engaging with key stakeholders and product owners for the Vehicle Pricing work, it was immediately obvious to me that they needed to be inspired about how they could improve and optimise their way of working. Their current world is very spreadsheet-heavy along side legacy enterprise systems, so they are used to looking at huge data grids.

This in turn makes their daily tasks very laborious and time-consuming.

Therefore I saw an opportunity to run a session about the art of the possible, showing the product owner and product specialist the possibilities of the web, and how to translate that into their process and needs. It turned into a whiteboard sketching session with the product owner drawing ideas inspired by what I’d introduced him to.

Proof of Concept

I took the graph that the product owner sketched out and worked with the Tech lead and a Deve pair to create a working proof of concept with dummy data. Resulting in a move towards a more intelligent and informative visual dashboard that we even put in-frontront of users for testing. The users were really happy that it was simpler to use and much easier and more obvious for them to spot a spike or drop (variance) in the data.

Proposal

The change in design focus has been pivotal in creating a more intelligent interface and user experience that will optimise the users task time. Now instead of reading through huge data tables, this information is now visualised in the format of graphs and charts. Making it much easier for users to spot any anomalies or variances in the data.

Impact & Influence

• Creating Design principles to help product teams make appropriate decisions, whilst bearing in mind some specific considerations.

• Supporting a strong company ethos of inclusion by driving a focus on accessibility to achieve WCAG 2.1 guideline.

• Showcasing the art of the possible with design workshops to inspire and inform product owners.

• GUI & Interaction design of an entirely new internal platform supporting the operation of a £2.2bn business.

• Bringing concepts to life with sketching and interactive prototypes.

• Introduction of a Design System for 2020 to allow multiple cross-functional teams to achieve a consistent brand experience.

• Conducting weekly user feedback sessions to involve users early and have them shape the product.

• Co-design workshops to engage users, stakeholders and the product teams in the product development process

• Service blueprints and storyboards to create a shared understanding of the users journey through the new platform