Raising the bar on vehicle quality

Product design > Turo case studies > Quality : Vehicle maintenance requirement

 

Synopsis

In 2021 my team spent time focusing on ensuring our Turo host’s vehicles were safe and reliable by imposing a new annual inspection requirement.

Details

Team: Host

Platforms: IOS/ Android/Web

Role: Lead Product Designer (Design lead on a cross functional team)

Timeline: 4 months

Skils: UX/UI, user research, content strategy

Company Problem

Vehicle safety & maintenance issues drive our worst guest experiences, deter prospective guests, and pose elevated risks to our business and brand.

Our leading reason for sub-5 star ratings from guests was around cleanliness and maintenance.

  • 61% of account flags (from Customer Support) are related to vehicle safety and maintenance

  • 16% of negative trip reviews tags are 'safety'. This figure does not include vehicles that were too unsafe to take the trip.

  • Vehicle quality issues are a top driver of NPS detractors: represent nearly 10% of all detractions



“I am not happy with this rental at all. […] The tires were bald and rubber peeling off the tires. Also the car would jerk violently to the right and steering wheel would shake uncontrollably.”

- Guest feedback from Jan 2021 trip

Hypothesis

By requiring annual vehicle safety inspections for all vehicles in the marketplace, we will increase the quality of all vehicles in the platform while ensuring a safe experience for our guests.

Inheriting a half done project

This project had begun a year earlier but was put down and the team working on it was dismantled right at the beginning of the pandemic.

The team assumed we could pick up where we left off, but I found significant changes that needed to be made to improve the user experience and adhere to our latest information architecture.

Before

After

Inherited designs by previous designer
Discovery Flow

Inherited designs by previous designer
Submit inspection flow Flow

Goals and metrics

Primary

  • Reduce share of trips rated sub 5-star for maintenance

  • Reduce share of vehicles manually restricted for maintenance

Counter metrics

  • Host activation rate

  • Active vehicles in search

Part one

Starting over

After assessing the existing implementation I started from the beginning with establishing a high level flow of what we expect to happen.

High level flow

Asking the right questions

Early on I met with my PM multiple times to make sure we were aligned on the scope of this project and had answers to key questions.

Conceptual directions

I needed to answer: Where does this feature live? How does a host find the place to submit their annual inspection? How can I make this easy for hosts who have multiple cars?

Concept one

Inspection settings live at the vehicle level. Hosts upload inspections one by one per vehicle.

Concept two

Banner opens a guided flow of all the current vehicles with inspections due.

Concept three

Setting can be accessed through any vehicle, but there’s a quick access to jump to the next vehicle after the flow.

Final direction

We decided to go with concept one for a few reasons:

  • It was the most straight forward and inline with all of our other settings.

  • The business felt comfortable with a pretty big assumption that that because most cars in a host’s fleet will not have inspections due at the same time, the process of drilling into individual listings to upload would not prove too tedious.

Part two

Ensuring optimal discovery

If a host did not submit their vehicle inspection in time, their vehicle would be unlisted from search until the requirement was met. This meant that our active supply was at stake, so we needed to ensure hosts discovered this new requirement, could locate the place to upload, and keep tabs on when due dates were coming up due.

Developing a series of banners

Using our semantic color language, we developed a series of banners that represented the different states of an inspection and applied logic on when we decide to alert the host at each level.

Overdue state

If at least one vehicle has been unlisted due to an overdue safety inspection, we persist a red banner at the top of the vehicles list. The color of this state was red to indicate a serious problem.

Due soon state

We used our yellow semantic colors to indicate warning and chose not to show a banner at the highest level, for we felt that it would likely sit in the first spot of the banner carousel for long periods of time and block priority of seeing other messages for other initiatives. Instead, we chose to rely on the red text next that would indicate each individual listing had an inspection due soon.

Not due

And lastly, we used our semantic coloring for confirmation/ in good status felt that confirming there wasn’t any inspection due was lowest priority, and therefore not necessary to show at either the top vehicles level, or the your car level.

Part three

Explaining the program

Once we got the host to the inspection settings page, we needed to balance the page layout to prioritize uploading the form with educating the host how to carry out the inspection.

Evolution of the safety inspection page

It took several reviews both with my product manager counter part and with the design team to balance the page with the proper amount of messaging.

 

Part four

Educating new hosts

Most of the project focused on helping existing hosts discover the new feature, successfully download the form and re-upload it. We knew there were new hosts that would list cars that were older and would be required to submit an inspection within the first three months of listing their car. We decided to update the post-listing flow content strategy to include this new information.

Existing post-listing experience

After a host completes a listing, a series of carousel messages were designed long ago to educate hosts on the “most important” information they need to know. The carousel has been added to over time and the messaging has become less succinct and focused. We knew we wanted to re-vamp this whole section, but time was not permitted, so we needed to at least find a way to include the inspection requirements without making the problem worse.

 

Updated post-listing experience

The highlighted pink sections are the areas we changed.

  • We replaced the bulleted list on the safety and quality standards page with subheads that made for easier scanning

  • We added a maintenance page to speak to the new maintenance requirements

  • We simplified the content on the refuel screen to only talk about refueling

  • We simplified the clean and disinfect screen to talk about the cleanliness requirements as well as the covid 19 training

 

Part five

Optimizing the upload form

This was a unique design challenge because we would be giving a host a digital pdf and they somehow had to have that PDF filled out either by printing it or sending it to their mechanic and then re-uploading a completed form.

Part of this experience is uploading images or PDFs and displaying that back to them. Turo historically had not developed a scalable solution to handle one off upload experiences. This meant extra complexity and time to build this feature.

The final prototype

I audited the guest booking funnel to identify the key places where the all-star host badge could live. What I soon discovered was how we display host information is inconsistent throughout this experience.

Usability research findings

We tested the flow with 6 Turo hosts in an unmoderated usability study to validate that the flow was clear and intuitive.

  • All hosts were able to successfully discover the new requirement via the banners and navigate to the proper location

This was enough for us to move forward confidently.

Final Outcome

We launched the program in October 2021 and as of January 2022, We had our first group of hosts who ignored all of our warnings both in the app and outside of the app, and had their cars unlisted. We knew some of this would happen as some of our supply is less engaged and motivated.

Overall, we know this was the right call, and even if it does churn a bit of our lower quality supply, we think it has done its job.

What I would do differently

At the end of the project, I was rolling off this team and moving onto two other teams and needed to offload some of the last of the QA and other responsibilities to another designer. Had I stayed on this team I would have advocated for a second follow up story, to add a filter on the vehicles list that would allow multi-car hosts to easily find the cars that had inspections due without scrolling through their entire list of cars.

Unfortunately, the new designer was unable to push for additional work and the team moved on. I would have liked to see this additional feature added as it would have unlocked other projects in the future.

 

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