Overview
Project Directive
- In under 100 days, deliver an Android application to the Google Play Store
- Create a novel engagement model with opportunities to direct traffic back to the company’s primary money making application
The outcome, up front: we shipped to the Google Play Store on day 92 of 100. The team was myself as sole UX designer, 1 UI designer, 1 Android engineers, and 1 product owner — small enough that every design decision had to be right the first time, or cheap to reverse.
My Role
- UX research
- Usability testing
- Guide feature direction
- Prototype, wireframe, design task flows
Phase 1
Brainstorming & Ideation
I facilitated a structured brainstorming session with 6 participants across engineering, product, and marketing. The three activities were chosen deliberately: paper airplanes lowered the stakes for non-designers unaccustomed to ideation; Flip Assumptions forced the room past our first, obvious ideas; and NUF scoring gave us a defensible, numbers-based way to converge — critical on a 100-day clock, because we could not afford to relitigate the direction later.
Activities
Make a paper airplane using only one hand. It’s a fun way to get started and break people out of their shell.
Write down as many assumptions as you have about your product. Then, flip those assumptions by listing out the opposite.
Take the flipped assumptions and rate each on a one-to-seven scale as potential products using the NUF scale (New, Useful, Feasible).
Key Discoveries
Vehicle care provided the ideal opportunity to link between new and existing products in the ecosystem.
Phase 2
Customer Interviews
I built mental model of users attitudes about vehicle care and evaluated their top concerns as car owners.
12 users participated in semi-structured user interviews from three distinct groups:
- Owned their first car for less than one year
- Owned vehicles for two to five years
- Owned vehicles for more than five years
Interview Questions
- What stands out to you about driving off the lot with your new car?
- What do you know now that you wish you knew before you bought your car?
- What resources have you used to help you deal with issues that have come up with your car?
- Have there been any situations where you’ve felt overwhelmed or underprepared?
Interview Takeaways
- Car owners across groups have a range of vehicle knowledge (high, medium, low) and varying degrees of willingness to work on their own cars.
- Electronic manuals are more helpful to new car owners while experienced car owners feel equally comfortable using either an electronic or glove box manual.
- People feel very attached to their vehicles across all participant groups.
Phase 3
Generate Personas
I created two personas at opposite ends of the car knowledge spectrum.
Phase 4
Interaction Design
The task flow below shows the core loop: onboarding → vehicle health score → challenge selection → task completion → score update → maintenance log. The loop is the engagement model — every feature on this list exists to feed it.
I used insights from customer interviews to split vehicle care into a score-based model that could be updated by completing tasks and challenges. The breakdown included:
- Vehicle usage metrics
- An overarching “health” score
- Tracking reminders to achieve maintenance milestones
- Insights and statistics about driver behavior in the US
- Maintenance logs
- Trip history
Final Designs
Key Features
- Engaging 8-bit style UI supported gamification
- Content supported persona’s maintenance goals
- Variety of personalization options
- Familiar Material Design navigation patterns
Outcomes
- 5,000+ downloads in the four months against a target of 3,500.
- 600 app users enrolled in the company-sponsored research program, creating a standing participant panel that cut recruiting time for future studies from weeks to days.
- The score-based interaction pattern was adopted for account setup and roadside assistance, validating the app’s real strategic purpose: a low-risk testbed for engagement models that route drivers back to the primary product.