- Mike Sierra
Principal Product Designer
UX/UI Product Design
Research
Marketing Design
Designer, researcher, and product partner for the new product offering called LulaSafe: An all in one background vetting tool for vehicle rental companies. As the lead product designer, I collaborated cloesly with engineering leads, customer success team members, partnering PM, and customers to deeply understand core problems and needs as a vehicle rental fleet owner.
Business outcomes that were achieved from this new product release: a +5 point gain in Net Promoter Score, a +2.8 minute gain in user Average Session Duration.
As a independent car rental business owner, safeguarding your rental fleet poses a considerable challenge. Assessing the risks associated with leasing out your vehicles becomes a complex task. How can you understand your renters potential risk and easily make important business decisions to keep your investment safe?
Introducing LulaSafe, an all-in-one driver vetting tool crafted to empower fleet owners. This tool enables swift and comprehensive evaluation of a driver's risk portfolio, offering an efficient solution to the intricate task of ensuring the safety and security of your valuable assets.
A simple, fast and user friendly experience that anyone can use. Live 24/7 customer support.
Pay only for the specific background checks you want to run. Easily understand whats important to you.
Empathy
Become your audience, designers are not users
Simplicity
Less is more, design things that last & are remembered
Instinctive
Good UX is felt not seen, think outside the box
Function over Form
Usability is the most important, even over the visual
Future Proof
How will it be utilized next, how will it need to evolve
Partnerships
talk to everyone to gain knowledge, in and outside your team
Customer Interviews
We conducted thirteen user interviews across varying customer types: owners of larger fleets of vehicles to smaller mom and pop shops. We framed questions that allowed for conversation that provided insights into the feelings and experiences associated with safely maintaining vehicle fleets. I then analyzed responses to find a general pattern from these interviews that were eventually aligned on with the team as key parts of the design needs of this project.
Team Interviews
We conducted brainstorming and problem discovery workshops with out sales and customer success, as they are on the front lines discussing issues and needs with our customers daily. We also included engineering team members to bring to new ideas to the table.
We uncovered certain patterns and wants that were voiced by multiple customers. These workshops also facilitated better relationships with other teams, while also informing others on how to run meaningful workshops that anyone could do.
Competitive Analysis
I researched multiple other companies that were also offering a similar product. Understanding other companies strength's and weaknesses is important to understand in a market with other potential competitors. One of the main goals was to understand what the market gaps were for potential customers, while also gaining information on what other similar data points user may find important.
Users want to understand a drivers risk profile before they rent the vehicle to ensure accidents don't occur. Knowing who the drivers were was important.
With all the types of different background checks, users dont have a strong sense of which ones are best for vehicle renters.
Users don't have easy access to easy vetting tools, in one comprehensive app that also allows them to manage their vehicles
After reviewing all the research and detailed findings, we were able to establish a user needs statement that we felt strongly aligned with the main problem our users were facing.
“As a user, I want to quickly and easily understand who is a risky driver, so that I can keep my vehicles safe.”
I conducted multiple user interviews to gather feedback on the wireframes and user flows of many of the designs. I needed to understand what information made sense to a user, could they interact and successfully complete given tasks, and general feeling of the flows.
15 user interviews were conducted where I shared Figma prototypes and examined users interacting with the prototypes as I asked them to complete certain tasks. These sessions were incentivized with Amazon gift-cards to show value of our customers time.
Net Promoter Score
Understanding that overall customer NPS has been quite low due to low product engagement, we found this to be the perfect opportunity to improve it.
Within a two month period, NPS grew within about 5 points and was projected to continue to rise as users discovered and utilized the new driver background vetting tool.
We captured NPS via in app and email surveys with Hotjar.
Average Session Duration
Due to not having a very sticky product offering that allowed for continued workflows within the app, average user session rate was about 1.5 minutes.
Tracking this metric closely with Pendo after release showed us a large spike in average user sessions over a 3 month period. Average user sessions increased by almost 3 minutes within 3 months.
