UX Case Study — Car repair and maintenance industry

7 min readJul 24, 2019

About

High-speed of life create new demands for industries. One of them is the automotive industry. The main goal of the study is enhancing the experience of repair and maintenance cars for consumers. After analyzing the market, consumers and their behavior I found valuable insights which helped discover the problems and figured out how to improve the pain points of the process.

This POC was done for 24 hours. It doesn’t much for these researches, so design solutions are based on hypothesizes.

Therefore the study is not intended to be the best solution. It just reflects design activities could be done for a short time. So the target of the case focuses on new experience of interaction between car owners and car workshop.

For a better understanding of the industry I conducted several activities, cross them:

Benchmark research;
Competitor analysis (direct and indirect);
CJM;
IA and User-flow;
Wireframes;
Visual Design;

But let’s start from the very beginning. Repair and maintenance industry was not familiar to me, that’s why I started with the numbers.

Benchmark research

My recommendation ( it doesn’t matters which project you are doing) keep in mind that benchmark overview can reflect the volume of the market, the demography of consumers and show niches for developing. It’s a really valuable source to get a better understanding of the industry.

The industry has performed reasonably well over the past five years. Industry operators provide essential and non-essential repair and maintenance services to private and commercial customers.

The number of registered cars in the United Kingdom has increased over the last five years. Falling fuel prices between 2013–2016 encouraged people to drive more, high public transport costs boosted demand for maintenance and repair services.

Meantime, the UK new car market declined by 6.8% in 2018. The decision to leave the European Union forced many consumers to postpone new car purchases, and instead proceed to repair their existing vehicles.

The majority by the body type of cars is passenger’s cars.

The average age of licensed cars at the end of 2017 was 8.1 years. It reflects the conditions of a car. We can assume about regularity and high frequency of car maintenance.

Before users research, I decided to dig a little deeper to analyze the existing car maintenance process of market players. I expected to find a lot of good and nice mobile applications and so on. But after a quick search, I learned that the majority of competitors present only websites.

So why mobile applications aren’t popular? Either consumers prefer desktop devices or either they booking a repairing in another environment where the mobile phone isn’t very comfortable in usage.

Booking Process

Naturally, I need to discover the booking process on the websites. It takes a few steps.

The first step looks very clear, a consumer just needs to enter the car number plate and postcode. The short form with number plate is a quick way to take all car details from the registration database. It is really helpful for non-proficient users who usually don’t know all the car details required to get a quote.
The next steps are more difficult. Consumer needs to describe a problem and choose services. The common practice display description of services and estimated price. Some websites have feature for non-proficient consumers, it helps to conduct diagnostic for a car. Booking flow could be quite difficult, some websites have nested serviсes. It could confuse consumers because of complicated information architecture of provided services. The majority of websites have a progress bar that displays the current position and remaining steps.
Timetable. I noticed the next step is optional. A lot of websites don’t have this step. And that’s understandable, It’s quite complicated to keep the timetable in relevant view. Almost all websites skip this step and immediately proceed to the consumer’s details. But some of them have a timetable. It’s reasonable to show the timetable after services. Some services can take more time, some less. So in the timetable consumer will see only relevant and suitable for his services spots.
The next step is the consumer’s details. His address and etc.

And….that’s it!

Generally speaking, the automatic process ends on this step. After completing booking user receives a phone call for confirmation booking and discussing details.

And it’s really not optimized process.

Competitor analysis

The process isn’t enough for getting a full picture of the market. So we need to compare the players and what they can offer

Competitors Analysis — Competitor analysis

Insights

To sum up the market research I highlighted the more interesting insights from my perspective.

The gap in the market — mobile application for end-users (we still need to define why the gat exist);
The providers supporting non-profession users with section help to conduct diagnostic car problems;
Most providers don’t show available time slots and don’t provide the ability to choose a time slot and reschedule a booking online;
All competitors don’t provide mobile application;
Most providers provide only an estimated price and don’t provide a map view with garages location;
A few providers provide the ability to add a few cars;
A few providers provide feedback about garage from service: https://www.trustpilot.com/;
A few providers provide instruction on how to get a quote;
All providers provide progress of booking;
All providers provide a list of services;

User Research

After finishing the market overview we finally can jump to user research and figured out all questions. Who is a typical user of car maintenance? Is it a proficient user or not? When and where does a consumer make a booking? How often do they use it? How does the user describe the car issue, and what to choose?

Cars became an accessible vehicle. Falling costs of fuel and simplification of the driving car process increased the level of car accessibility. Almost everyone is able to buy a car. It means, number of people who don’t know how to fix their car increased.

Of course, everything starts before interaction with a car maintenance provider. After a short interview session, I figured out the sequence of consumers steps. All respondents divided into two groups:

1 group is going to try to understand what happened with their car and try to fix it by themselves.
2 group is non-proficient users who don’t know what happened and will not fix it by themselves.

With this info, we can go to the next steps. Let’s consider the most difficult situation, for non-proficient user

Customer Journey Map

Let’s extend our flow and define all pain points during this process. CJM helps discover more detailed interaction and highlight the full picture of the process.

To be more precise, not only end-users involved in the car maintenance process. There are also other participants.

Workshop owners
Mechanics
End-users

In my short research and POC, I focused on end-users.

Direction

As can we see there are a lot of points which could be improved, but it’s too much for such a short period. Here is the list of the main problems and possible solutions.

Of course, during this study was missed several important steps, like prioritizing, communication with stakeholders and deep analyzing of the process.

IA and user flow

The next step was to build a user flow diagram. On this scheme designed detailed flow for end-users and draft directions for workshop owners and a mechanics

Wireframes

Because of short term for POC, I decided to save up time and created a paper prototype.

Prototyping

And finally, I can proceed to visual design. Let’s look at the design solutions, what was done and what was improved based on my research.

And UI flow with all screens and possible cases. it’s not a necessary step for the project, but usually, this kind of representation is better to understand and navigate.