I led design direction and user research for the new Roadside Assistance app (14 million+ members), addressing business needs while advocating for the user.
Currently, the only way to request roadside assistance from AAA is to call their hotline. In bad weather situations the call center is usually overwhelmed by the amount of calls coming in. Often times the customers do not know their current location where their vehicle has broken down. This delays the response time for the tow truck drivers in locating the driver.
Develop a mobile app where the customers can request roadside assistance with just a few clicks without having to call into the call center. Implement geolocation into the app so that the user doesn't have to figure out what location they're at.
After collaborating with the Product and Marketing teams, we determined AAA's primary users, which consisted of affluent baby boomers. We used this knowledge to create a user-friendly app that adhered to W3C's accessibility guidelines.
Because this was a new product, I collaborated with our Marketing and Product teams to develop a competitive analysis. This crucial step allowed us to determine the competition's strengths and weaknesses, which we then leveraged to improve our own product.
We made the decision to start development for iOS devices first because a significant amount of the mobile traffic were coming from iPhones.
We gathered stakeholders, designers, engineers, and even the VP of the internet department to come together to come up with as many solutions as possible for the new app. Everyone had about an hour to do their sketching. The activity was done in silence in order to minimize group think.
When the hour was over we then taped all of our sketches on the whiteboard. Then we voted on the best solutions by placing red stickers on them. The solution that receives the most votes will move into the wireframing phase and then the design phase.
To streamline the development process, I collaborated with our front-end engineering team to create a design system. This improved scalability by ensuring consistent implementations of UI patterns across all consumer products.
The member’s pickup location is automatically determined within a couple of seconds of them opening up the app. We were able to accomplish this by utilizing our geolocation capabilities. User research has shown that most of our members rarely knows the exact location of their vehicle breakdown. Removing one step in an already stressful situation helps our members with some peace of mind.
Additionally, we implemented the truck tracker feature to further reduce our members’ anxieties and gain their trust. The feature provided them with an estimation of the arrival time and the truck driver’s name. If needed, communication with the truck driver could be done through text messages or phone call.
