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Eight months to launch

My time on Driven Brands began shortly after our strategy team had completed their research on how to best bring evolve their 14 after-market car care brands into a new digital landscape that would drive cross-sell opportunities. While a roadmap was created, the more stable outcome from the research was the demographic we’d be targeting: The Car Parent! This younger persona type would need an app to easily assist them in their car maintenance.
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The team would begin with two brands, Take 5 Wash and Take 5 Oil, with plans to bring on others, like Meineke or Maaco, in the future. Their existing app, Take 5 Wash, had a lengthy 20+ step sign-up process and lacked scalability, giving the experience team an opportunity to significantly streamline the UX, while engaging with our newly identified core persona. To that end, the project was divided into four tracks starting in parallel:

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Moving the needle

At this stage, the Brand Identity track was still in its early phases, and the development team was conducting discovery work on using license plate lookups for app registration (Spoiler: That feature was cut). To get around these blocking dependencies, I made the most of this time by focusing on simpler tasks such as login/signup, onboarding, and account settings. In order to not be held up from a development standpoint, the goal would be to develop with an out-of-the-box frontend library based in React Native, until the Brand Identity track could be completed knowing there would be some refactoring happening. We also began designing some e-commerce framework needs, despite uncertainties about which products would ultimately be sold.

Surprise! Just six months to launch

Just after joining the project, our timeline was shortened by 2 months, so the client could present the app to shareholders at their next board meeting. This further complicated some technical impediments and delays that our cross-functional team was working through. Notably, there was no technical framework for e-commerce, nor reliable APIs allowing us to connect to the Take 5 existing databases. To further complicate matters, our Resonance Testing reflected that users were overwhelmingly interested in a vehicle status-based checklist, but technical and legal issues prevented us from considering it as a viable option. Paradoxically, the only path forward would be a significantly pared down feature-set which still felt robust enough to stand alone as a meaningful product…all without any concrete details on crucial things.

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An ambiguous road

Up until this point, we had presented multiple concepts for the best way to engage users in the Loyalty App, even though the core business logic regarding the Driven Rewards Program hadn’t been determined (and wouldn’t be until only a few weeks before launch!). Whatever we designed had to be able to absorb any type of progression scheme with clear ways of communicating the rules. Many of the Product team’s proposals weren’t going to be achievable by our engineering team due to the lack of time, technical foundational systems unable to be utilized/created, or rewards that the client wasn’t willing to offer.

Whiteboarding FTW

Faced with this lengthy product stalemate, the entire team came together at a week-long summit at the Huge offices in NYC. We revisited the previous ideas such as a board game, card game, badge/sticker collect-a-thon, but ultimately agreed on a solution that was fun, unique, and could be executed within our new timeframe.

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Good car parenting

We landed on a car Tamagotchi-inspired approach, leveraging the newly completed Brand Identity work, in which an animated car dynamically changes based on its needs. Since we weren’t legally able to provide prescriptive recommendations, I worked closely with our Lead Engineer to establish a time degradation model to alter the car's visual state that would also trigger notifications. Collaborating with the Visual Design team and our Director of Motion, we designed the car as a multi-layer component, leveraging Lottie animations, with a background for oil states, the car itself in the middle, and foreground layers to indicate that the car is dirty and in need of a wash. Completing services like a wash or oil change would reset the status to full, and accumulate points to progress through tiers of the Driven Rewards Program.

Born to scale

As an added bonus, this variable-state setup was future-proof. Future iterations could allow users to choose their car type or update cosmetics, even incorporating other maintenance needs within Driven Brands, like windshield repair. We shortly received client confirmation on the Driven Rewards Program parameters, meaning we could finally marry the spec with designs, lock down our scope, and race toward the MVP. In addition to the animated car personas, we were also able to layer in some money-saving tips, and a tier progression architecture. Thankfully, the pages communicating these mechanics were designed to be separate as to not overwhelm the user, and could be finished separate from our new car “pal”.

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Reaching the finish line

While the dev team crunched toward our MVP, our UX researcher conducted user testing with a robust prototype of the app that the design team built, gaining insights for final pre-launch tweaks. On launch day, we introduced the app to a few key stores in Arkansas, answering questions and conducting on-the-ground interviews with customers and helping the staff with any questions. The reception was great with higher engagement and a higher rating than their original app, and Driven made plans to roll out to more stores later in the year. As a testament to their happiness with the MVP, they decided to take the product roadmap in-house, and continue supporting the app and its iterations with their internal team. Some other highlight KPIs and outcomes include:

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