After successfully expanding its Maven carsharing service from a pilot in Ann Arbor, MI to cities across North America, General Motors’ Maven group partnered with my team to elevate their mobile app experience by addressing friction points and envisioning feature enhancements to reinforce Maven’s brand promise of seamless mobility services.
THE CHALLENGE
During its pilot program, Maven launched a minimally viable version of the Maven mobile app to support its Car Sharing model (think Zipcar, car2go).
Over time, new features were layered upon this basic app foundation, including a distinct feature set offering weekly rentals to Gig workers such as Uber, Lyft or Grubhub drivers.
After establishing and scaling these mobility services nationally, Maven engaged my team to enhance the customer experience in order to increase satisfaction, reduce negative app reviews and ensure that customers felt guided at each step of their journey.
In two months time, Maven needed to have a batch of approved, ready-to-build designs, in addition to an approved strategic roadmap to guide their product development plans for the next three to five years.
THE VISION
To overcome these challenges, we aligned the project around two main areas of focus.
Conduct research to map how Maven currently supports the customer journey for these services, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement
Translate service design research into a prioritized product roadmap, outlining a potential release schedule for new app capabilities in the future
Explore, design, validate and refine key conceptual ideas for mobile app enhancements in order to establish organizational alignment
Address confusion between Car Sharing and Gig Rentals during enrollment, and improve the experience at known points of friction and dropoff
Create a vision for more seamless search and trip extensions along with more contextual help and support experiences throughout the mobile app
Collaborate with Maven’s engineers to ensure that design solutions for high-priority areas are fully detailed and development-ready
THE APPROACH
To achieve our project goals, we organized our work into three major phases.
In my role as UX Director, I planned the UX approach, then led the full project team through research, ideation, design and testing activities to advance the product vision. My team and I then traveled to Detroit to co-create solutions side by side with GM senior executives, strategist and engineers to elevate Maven’s mobility services.
Discovery Workshops
Mobile App Evaluation
Carsharing Service Evaluation
Customer & Market Trends
Journey Maps
Service Blueprints
Ideation Workshops
Creative Mood Boards
UX/UI Concept Exploration
Conceptual Prototype
Concept & Usability Testing
Product Roadmap
Detailed Wireframes
Style & Pattern Library
Functional UI Prototypes
Detailed Design Comps
User Acceptance Testing
Roadmap Project Planning
DISCOVERY
We constructed an online ‘Design Hub’, updated regularly with our latest research and design output, enabling real-time cross-functional visibility into our progress.
The UX team rented vehicles and met with Gig economy drivers, evaluating Maven’s physical service and mobile experience firsthand to discover insights.
We created journey maps to illustrate key customer interactions, mindsets and critical moments at each stage of Maven’s Carsharing and Gig Rental service experiences.
We then collaboratively developed Service Blueprints, capturing key operational elements – people, processes, systems, artifacts – that enable customer service delivery.
Synthesizing our research findings, we identified twenty distinct opportunity areas that Maven could pursue to improve the customer experience.
Roadmap Definition
I led the team in collaboratively scoring, ranking and plotting each of the identified design opportunity areas on two dimensions: value to the customer and organizational readiness.
We translated these ranked opportunities into a strategic product roadmap to guide Maven’s product development team for the next three to five years.
Concept Definition
The Visual Design team developed Mood Boards to explore an elevated look, feel and style to serve as a foundation for the new mobile experience design.
I led two days of collaborative brainstorming and sketching with the Maven team, exploring solutions to challenges like booking, damage reporting, trip extensions and more.
Within our Design Hub, we captured requirements and created clickable prototypes for new feature ideas, such as Intelligent Trip Extensions and End Trip messaging…
EV Charging and Emergency Maintenance instructions…
…and a best-in-class vehicle reservation experience with integrated vehicle wayfinder and directions.
Detailed DESIGN
We first conducted customer interviews to validate our enrollment flow and contextual help design concepts; then to guide Maven’s software engineering team, we delivered a combination of annotated wireframes and design comps as well as clickable prototypes for key interactions.
THE IMPACT
For Maven, we used service design methods to give General Motors’ engineering-driven team a holistic, empathetic view of the complete customer journey for the first time — a powerful first step towards building better services for their customers.
GUIDED WELCOME EXPERIENCE
Designed a welcome and enrollment experience that helps users easily differentiate Maven’s service offerings
CONTEXTUAL HELP & SUPPORT
Delivered a vision for more contextual, integrated help and support surfaced at key points in the customer journey
INNOVATIVE APP FEATURES
Defined concepts for new and enhanced features such as search, EV charging, damage reporting and fraud protection
FUTURE PRODUCT ROADMAP
Developed a strategic roadmap to drive the GM Maven team’s product development plans for the next 3-5 years
