UX Case Study
UX Researcher & Product Designer
After experiencing some usability issues when booking a car wash, I undertook a non-user evaluation and redesigned the spiffy car wash mobile app.
After conducting an heuristic evaluation and task analysis, I discovered usability violations making learnability, increasing the cognitive load required to book a car wash appointment, and decreasing the flexibility and robustness of the application.
For a social application that user's visit every day, usability violations are often overlooked because the daily use ensures memory of obscure user flows and inconsistent actions. However, when a utilitarian application, used infrequently, violates so many usability principles, the user has to relearn how to navigate and operate the application every time, creating considerable frustration.
UI Pain Point:
There is no obvious design pattern. UI elements, their placement, and their colors are inconsistent and they lack affordance.
Solution:
Tame the color palette.
Use consistent fonts, icons, and elements.
First Use Pain Points:
The main case, booking a car wash appointment, is given equal weighting on the home screen to messaging, arguably an edge case.
The navigation has too many items and they are not grouped according to Gestalt's proximity principle.
There is no ability to cancel an appointment once scheduled.
Solutions:
Persistent navigation elements have been deployed reducing 3 screens to 2.
Priority has been given to the main case, booking an appointment.
The ability to cancel scheduled appointments has been provided.
Messages now contained within a single feed, accessible from the persistent navigation, but not occupying the home screen.
Account items have been grouped together and reduced by removing anything superfluous to booking appointments.
Booking Pain Points
The steps to book a car wash are out of context and they are spread out across too many screens.
Users think of booking based on a time and day which informs the location, instead the app forces users to think location first.
There is inconsistent language used across the app for similar user actions.
UI elements for regressing to a previous state and exiting from a user flow are conflated.
Solutions:
Total steps reduced from 5 to 2 with a more subtle progress UI approach.
When and where a user wants the car wash contextualized following Gestalt's proximity principle.
Date, time and location all accomplished in one step.
Consistency in closing out of each screen.
Selection Pain Points:
Selecting a vehicle, which informs the price (sedan vs SUV) is 4 steps when it could be reduced to 2.
There is no way of reverting to the previous state from the vehicle info screen.
There are too many service options and they are impossible to compare by tool tips and overlays for each service.
Another set of options appears to choose from and I obviously don't have the data, but I would guess a significant majority of users simply skip.
Solutions:
Half the number of fields now required for vehicle info.
Reduced the service options just 3 to choose from, low, medium and high to increase conversions and minimize cognitive load from too many choices
Easy to compare the 3 available service options.
Number of steps to complete has been greatly reduced.
Payment Pain Points:
The application immediately crashed after I entered credit card details.
There is not enough error messaging, exits or error prevention within the app.
Stored credit cards must be verified by reentering all details for each subsequent booking.
Solutions:
Easy to identify accepted cards before attempting to enter them.
Minimum number of steps required to complete.
Task migratability from the user to the system for storing and retrieving card details.
