Faster Vehicle Service Scheduling

The Opportunity:

We need to know who needs an appointment and gather as much information about the service being requested. The danger, however, is that we ask for too much information that the consumer abandons the process and the dealership loses the appointment. I developed this one-pager to show the information we "needed", "wanted", and could "just gather".

Creating the Dataflow

Many of the in-market solutions are being over populated with options and choices. Dealerships aren't allowing consumers to simply schedule an appointment and because of this, off-brand competitors like Jiffy Lube are getting all the service dollars. I wanted to develop a way of gathering the information the dealership wants without discouraging the consumer. At any point, the consumer should be able to say "enough with this" and simply schedule their appointment. I developed the below data-flow to accomplish this task.

Putting the Dataflow into Practice:

Starting with mobile first (always a good practice) I developed this prototype. This is actually the second mobile prototype developed. I wanted to test allowing a phone's browser handling selections (dropdown menus etc.) vs. taking over the process and forcing a user interface. This second version, where we force a consistent user interface rather than allowing the browser to control the selection behavior, performed significantly better in our usability tests. We dubbed the interface a "touch path".

View Prototype

Head-to-Head Competitor Testing:

Expanding on the lessons learned from the mobile experience, I developed this desktop prototype to be used in a competitive analysis test. Because browsers on desktops handle dropdowns more consistently, we returned the handling of selections to the browser in a few cases (specifically the dependent single variable ones.) This hand-coded prototype was done so that consumers couldn't tell that this was just a prototype. That allowed for better direct one to one comparisons in testing.

View Prototype

Competition Test Results:

Working with usertesting.com, we were able to develop and approve a script, and gather in-market testers that were looking to get vehicle service done. And with the high functioning of the prototype we could test against the main in-market competitor. After the first competitive analysis test, we were able to prove this prototype is preferred to the top in-market competitor 5 to 1. Below are some of the highlights from the first competitive analysis test.

The business impact:

When companies invest in the true UX experience from end to end there is a lot of business value to be gained. In this situation, CDK Global allowed us to do the market research, conduct the competitive analysis, and gave us the time to do usability and competitive testing. The result, put plainly, is that CDK Global now knows this approach to service scheduling is better than what is in-market today, and it cost them 0 developer dollars to find out.