Information Center for Administrators of a “Company Car” Plan
http://ku0g0e.axshare.com/#p=dashboard
Audience
Leadership of a major car leasing company
Team
Myself as “UX Lead,” visual designer, supported by additional UX resource and some development team members
Challenge
Our client wanted to think through all the features that would be required to administer a new model for providing “company cars” in order to present the idea to the company leadership. (Summer 2013)
techniques & tools
Group “Design Studio”-like session, plenty of discussion, small group usability testing; Axure, whiteboards with lots of fresh WriteErase pens.
outcome
The work created a very extensive (but visually lo-fi) clickable prototype. The larger project—to actually build the application—was not completed because senior leadership did not take to the idea of adding this new company car model to their offerings. ( I have heard that they did add the new model several years later. )
Project Overview
Remember that great job you had where instead of a “company car,” you were reimbursed for all your expenses to drive your own choice of car? Even if it was a 280Z? Yeah, me neither—never had that kind of job.
Our primary client for this project was a manager at a traditional car leasing firm: the firm provided the vehicles to its clients, and managed the various fuel, insurance and maintenance needs. The manager wanted to sell leadership at the leasing firm on a program which would allow clients’ employees to drive their own cars while the leasing firm tracked mileage, fuel reimbursement, insurance coverage and all the other details. You can imagine this program as attractive to employees who could choose their own ride—BMW X1 instead of a Chevy Malibu? Yes please!
In order to be able to ‘sell’ the leasing firm’s leadership on the idea, our client wanted to think through as many details as possible, make a solid presentation to his bosses, and have a development firm ready to build the actual application as soon as he got the go-ahead. We would do this by creating a clickable prototype of the application for the administration of this ‘bring your own car’ company car program.
Research, Jam Sessions and Feedback
Work on the project began with a two-day meeting similar to a “Design Studio,” where another UX Lead and myself, a visual designer, lead developer and project manager met with four or five experts from the leasing firm, including our primary client. We led sessions to understand the business model, document the roles of those who would use the system and explore the needs, constraints and opportunities that the administration application—called the “Reimbursement Command Center”—would meet.
Jam Sessions
We then spent multiple months working out the overall structure of the application: dashboards for day-to-day monitoring as well as for events like onboarding, reporting at executive and detail levels, controlling communication with drivers and so on. All that we learned fed conversations and whiteboard sessions between our visual designer and myself where we sketched our ideas and shared them with our colleagues.
Those whiteboard sketches were turned into a clickable prototype using Axure by me with some layout suggestions from the visual designer.
Feedback
We shared the work in progress with our primary client for feedback, and also held several sessions both one-on-one and in very small groups with some of the individuals who would be actual users of the completed product. This feedback gave us knowledge to iterate the prototype multiple times.
The Upshot
I’ve cleaned the prototype of identifying details, since the client would not have wanted to be identified, and made it available here. It’s actually hugely complicated; I’m sure I don’t remember the half of what all the screens are for. Our primary client was happy with the result, although to be honest I’m not sure exactly how he used it. I do know that at the time, his presentation to the leasing firm’s leadership did not go well and the project did not advance beyond this stage.
If I knew the next steps were cut off because the prototype was bad, I probably wouldn’t be showing it to you; my recollection is that the senior leadership—I believe it was still a family-owned business at the time—was very conservative in their business and were not ready to take on this new approach to company car leasing.
Hubris and Personal Learnings
I do ask myself if the overall idea would have been better received if this prototype had been made at a higher fidelity. I can’t answer that, of course, because I don’t actually know if the prototype was shown to the leadership of the company. When creating a prototype, we must consciously walk a line between investing too little and too much time (and therefore money) in it overall. It has to give the impression of something that can be, to spark the imagination (and therefore the funding), but there is a danger of looking too polished and giving the impression that the go-live is mere days away.
So it is important at the beginning of building a prototype to ask “why? what purpose does this prototype serve?” The answer to such a question should guide us in our choices for visual appearance, realism of data presented, what environment to prototype in and other key decisions.