Divvy
Support for multi-member households sharing one vehicle.
Scope of Work
UX/UI Design, UX Research, Branding, Usability Testing
Tools
Figma, Whimsical, Mural, Loom, Otter
Project Type
End-to-end mobile app
Client
Personal project
Domain
Scheduling & Lifestyle
Date
September, 2024
Project Overview
Background
As gasoline prices rise and environmental concerns grow many households are opting to share a single car. However, coordinating this shared use can be challenging.
I set out to explore how a technical solution might facilitate better coordination for houses sharing a single vehicle.
Problem
Many households are choosing to maintain one car, whether for financial or environmental reasons, or simply due to a dislike of driving. However, coordinating schedules among household members can be challenging, especially when it comes to tracking the availability of a shared vehicle.
Households with a single car are looking for a straightforward solution to check car availability, ensure they have access to a car when needed, and communicate effectively about their schedules and travel needs.
Goals
Provide an efficient, well-designed tool for households sharing one vehicle. This tool should enable individuals to check their car availability, schedule their car in advance, and remind themselves and other household members when they have use of the car.
“How might we help households sharing one vehicle remember their car schedule and ensure transportation is available for everyone when they need it?”
Competitive analysis
User interviews
Affinity mapping
User personas
Goals & problem statements
Feature List
User flows
Site map
Low-fidelity wireframes
Usability testing
Branding & logo design
Component and UI library
High-fidelity wireframes
Prototyping
Usability testing
High priority revisions
Research
Over the past year, I observed many friends and colleagues decide to share a single vehicle within their households. Each time, they mentioned various difficulties, including scheduling conflicts, equitable contribution to gas and maintenance, and communication about necessary maintenance like oil changes. This prompted me to explore whether other households sharing a car encountered similar challenges.
“We use a wall calendar, but you never know what you’re going to forget in the rush out the door. Or if you forget to update it or just forget to look at it. I wish there was some system that sent you a text or a reminder so you could always know ‘oh right, today I have to take my bike.’ or to save that extra step of coordination.”
These interviews quickly confirmed my hypothesis: scheduling and communicating about car usage was indeed one of the biggest challenges faced by these households. However, it became clear there was a lot more to unpack. The complexity of car ownership and the challenges of sharing an asset that needs regular maintenance meant there was a lot to digest and understand in this particular problem space.
After synthesizing my research using an affinity map, I identified several key themes and insights that would shape the direction of this project.
After conducting a thorough competitive analysis, I confirmed that no viable solutions currently exist. Most car-sharing apps cater to individuals looking to rent out their vehicle or focus on fleet management. The few apps that came close to addressing the specific use cases I was interested in were poorly designed, lacked adequate support, and were often developed in other languages. As a result, they were either unavailable in the U.S. or had awkward translations that created significant barriers to usability. Even the most comprehensive app, WeeShare, was geared toward supporting a community sharing economy, focusing on shared ownership of larger items like vacation homes and boats rather than single households sharing a car.
Recognizing this clear, unmet need, it was time to engage potential users directly. I conducted in-depth interviews with seven individuals living in households that share one car. I explored their motivations, feelings about sharing one vehicle, challenges they face, and the strategies they employ to coordinate, enabling me to uncover what works versus what doesn’t.
Key Insights
Households are generally motivated to share a car for the same three reasons:
financial savings
environmental concerns
a dislike of driving
Several factors contribute to the complexity of sharing a car, influencing the needs of each household. Elements such as the presence of children, pets, or elderly parents, proximity to family, and the walkability of one’s neighborhood all play significant roles. This variability suggests there is ample opportunity for future feature development, even after addressing the primary scheduling challenge.
Most households have developed methods to manage and communicate their car schedule, but mistakes still occur. For instance, if someone forgets to check or update the calendar.
Define
After collecting and collating all the information from these interviews, I developed user personas. I decided to take the two most tangible motivations for maintaining a single car in a household and split them into separate users, ensuring any solution would be sure to address and consider both user needs.
With a clear understanding of the users and the central problem to be solved for those users, I was able to articulate the goals for this project and develop a feature list that would focus on the core challenge of scheduling and scheduling reminders for booking a shared vehicle.
Ideate
Before working on screen layouts or designs, I needed to determine exactly what my users would be trying to accomplish from the moment they downloaded the proposed app well into months and years of use. I mapped out three key user flows to address the primary challenges users faced and any additional actions they would expect to perform within the app. These flows acted as a guide for the application’s overall structure and functionality.
As I began designing low-fidelity wireframes to support these user flows, it became clear I needed to simplify my ideas even further to create a true MVP.
Initially, I had planned to include a feature that helped users draft agreements for car sharing to avoid future conflict. I had also envisioned supporting multiple vehicles and offering local suggestions in the event of an emergency. However, thinking in terms of iterative product development and getting value to users quickly, I refined my focus on the core need: providing an easy way to schedule and communicate about shared car usage along with automated reminders for those schedules.
This refocus significantly reduced the number of screens needed, allowing me to move forward with rough designs centered primarily on scheduling and reminders.
I built out a prototype in Figma using the low-fidelity wireframes and moved on to test three tasks with five participants. Participants were asked to:
Create a new account
Book the car for an existing event in their calendar
Adjust their notifications
All participants completed the tasks with ease, validating my user flows and screens, even in low-fidelity form. However, they encountered difficulties in several areas, including:
Understanding the relationship between the app and their external calendars.
Navigating some interactions, form fills, and language used in the onboarding process.
Wanting the ability to create new events rather than just editing events imported from their external calendars.
Finding the placement of household and car information on the home unexpected.
Additionally, the low-fidelity testing highlighted key moments when users expected feedback from the app. This enabled me to develop a comprehensive list of feedback points to build out as I transitioned to higher-fidelity designs.
Design
With a rough idea of the screens and necessary assets, it was time to focus on the branding, name, and overall look of the app. I named it “Divvy,” a fun and concise name that reflects the idea of sharing an asset. For branding inspiration, I turned to insights gathered from user interviews, guided primarily by these key findings:
Users chose to share one car out of a sense of financial and environmental stewardship.
Despite the challenged of coordinating a shared vehicle, interviewees often viewed the arrangement positively. They noted that sharing a car fostered trust and partnership as it required increased coordination amongst household members and partners.
Users primary concern revolved around not having transportation when they might need it most— whether for doctors’ appointments, caring for pets or children, or meeting professional commitments.
These insights indicated that for Divvy to earn a spot on users’ home screens, it would need to position itself as a trusted partner in the goal of sharing.
Environmental and economic motivations led me to develop a color palette for Divvy based on various shades of green. Initially, the palette consisted entirely of green tones, leaning into gentle, pleasing, nature-based hues complemented by one vibrant accent color for emphasis and dividers. After later testing, I introduced a contrasting red to highlight negative actions and important information. All colors were checked for accessibility and the red was used sparingly to ensure crucial information remained visible to users with red-green color blindness.
For typography, I chose friendly, clean, and modern fonts to convey simplicity and trust.
The logo design drew from several fonts that reflected the solid curves of a road while suggesting a sense of gentle movement. I aimed for a look reminiscent of popular car logos while injecting an approachable, eco-friendly vibe. To enhance the design, I added a curving, asymmetrical tittle above the “i,” introducing softness and subtly evoking the shape of a leaf to reinforce the theme of environmental partnership.
With Divvy’s look and feel in place, I moved on to design all the necessary components, build out the UI kit, and design all of the high-fidelity screens required to bring a prototype for Divvy to life.
Using the high-fidelity wireframes, I developed a prototype in Figma to test five essential user flows:
Onboarding to Divvy
Adding your car to an existing event
Creating a new event
Adjusting notifications
Unbooking your car from an event and looking up public transit options
Test
I conducted usability tests with five participants. Tests were conducted in person on a mobile phone using Loom to record screen interactions and Otter to produce a transcript of the conversations. All participants completed five tasks with a 100% success rate:
Onboarding to Divvy
Adding your car to an existing event
Creating a new event
Adjusting notifications
Unbooking your car from an event and looking up alternative transit
Success Metrics
Achievement rate
100%
Average time on task: Scenario 1
2:10
Average time on task: Scenario 2
1:51
Average time on task: Scenario 3
1:33
Average time on task: Scenario 4
:23
Average time on task: Scenario 5
:24
“I like the simplicity in the design... it’s just peaceful and easy to use. And I think that’s important, considering the potential of stress connected to becoming a one car household.”
“This is awesome! Can we use this in our house now?”
“This is so cool, I wish we could go ahead and use it!”
Testing Insights:
All participants completed the tasks quickly and efficiently.
Participants expressed enthusiasm about the overall look and feel, particularly praising the logos, illustrations, colors, and UI elements.
Participants overwhelmingly loved the consistent feedback from their actions within the app.
Overall, participants described the design as “easy,” “straightforward,” and “intuitive.”
Every participants found something delightful in the design, whether it was the illustrations, car avatars, or motivational metrics for cost and carbon savings.
Areas for improvement:
Visibility of car availability from the home dashboard.
Centralizing the booking experience, particularly regarding the home screen and the hierarchy within event detail pages.
Clarifying metrics in the motivational metrics section.
Additional verification steps when unbooking a car from an event.
Simplifying the booking flow between booking a new event and adding a car to an existing event.
I updated the designs based on the test results, making car booking and availability the central focus of every screen. This involved fine-tuning the visual hierarchy, simplifying features, and removing extraneous information. I paid particular attention to the event pages to enhance the car booking process and reimagined the dashboard to provide more relevant information for booking.
In addition, I developed more flexible interactions for creating new events and designed additional components to illustrate how time and date selection would function. I simplified and clarified the language on screens where users had paused or struggled, increased the fidelity of the map for alternative transit options, and rebalanced font sizes and layouts throughout the screens for improved usability.
Conclusion
While the scope of this project allowed for only one high-fidelity iteration, if given more time I would conduct another round of user testing with the updated and polished prototype. My focus would be on ensuring that all interactions and flows related to calendars and events are seamless, so users feel confident navigating those actions.
There is also significant potential for growth with this app. Test participants abd users I interviewed expressed enthusiasm about the concept as well as a desire to use the app in their housholds. With the primary user challenge addressed, I would love to revisit this project to iteratively develop additional features, such as expense tracking and splitting, multi-car support, car maintenance reminders, and smarter suggestions for alternative transit options.
