Volvo Cars
Ux/Ui Design + Interaction Design
In 2019, I worked with Volvo’s product design team in Sunnyvale, California and Gothenburg, Sweden to evolve the digital experience of customers purchasing their premium vehicles and vehicle subscriptions online. This work was born from a shift in Volvo’s overall business strategy. A new focus to sell vehicles directly to customers. The goal of this direction being to provide a better customer experience with their brand and increase overall revenue and profit margins.
At the start of 2018, and at the outset of this new business initiative, Volvo had no digital experience in place to support this strategy and had thus made $0 from direct customer sales. Now, their Care by Volvo subscription generates more than $2 million in monthly revenue, is operational in 6 countries world wide, and is considered the most sustainable venture amongst vehicle subscription offerings.
The following projects are samples of the work that I contributed to during my 10 month contract with Volvo, since this work includes concepts and processes that are confidential, no images writing below should be shared.
A Flexible Approach to Our Design System
While a larger methodology behind Volvo’s global design system was being devised outside of our team — myself and the other designers working with Care By Volvo products, created a local design system which housed the components we used to build out web and mobile apps ui’s. In addition to a Ui system we also utilized full-screen components to aid in the expression of different market experiences, ideation, and for bullet-proofing our process.
Clarify Care By Volvo and It’s Purchase Choices During Checkout
Care by Volvo Checkout Experience and Order Interaction
You’ve just said to yourself, …“Buying a car through Care By Volvo sounds like an interesting proposition and the idea of buying a car without having to go to a dealer and haggle sounds very appealing—but I’m not sure exactly what’s included and if it’s worth the price”. After doing some more research on the details of subscription service and Volvo’s line of vehicles you decide to click-through the vehicle configurator to see exactly just how easy it might be to buy a car online.
To enhance customer understanding and subscription customization during the checkout experience, I developed an interaction concept that would give customers clarity and control of exactly was included with their subscription directly during their checkout. The business value of this idea was underscored by the ability to also include additional add-on options for purchase.
To complete this concept, I worked directly with the Care by Volvo checkout experience product manager. Together we first addressed the problem of how to best communicate the specifics of what was included with a subscription as customers got further into their purchase. Then we worked together to strengthen our overall position for adding this feature to the 2020 roadmap by connecting, our concept by influencing a new business outcome through the offering of a new way to provide additional options for purchase that weren’t currently available to customers.
The UX here leveraged the Google material backdrop pattern and was tailored to fit the needs of our content and experience. As a point of reference, I found this to be nice since it offered a familiar interaction that fit our needs, while also offering our front-end engineering team a precedence for implementation across varying screen sizes. Below is a video from the the native figma prototype of this pattern.
Saving Vehicle Configurations and Capturing Customer Leads:
A Simplified First Step
Care by Volvo Checkout Experience and Customer Lead Capture
In addition to the XC40 Recharge Pre-Order experience, the majority of the work I accomplished for Volvo was for the digital ordering, or checkout experience, for Care by Volvo. Since Care by Volvo is one of few comprehensive vehicle subscription services, our team faced a few core and novel customer problems. The process of purchasing a vehicle online is new to customers and the subscription service needs to communicate its value, both literally and intrinsically. We needed to make people feel like the experience is far easier and more enjoyable than buying a vehicle at a dealership and to help guide them along in the journey.
To develop the ground work for the checkout experience, I worked with two product managers in an iterative process. We communicated every day about our efforts and every two weeks, went live with new ideas to begin to shape the experience overtime.
Every so often, I had key opportunities to influence strategic design changes which impacted business as well as the customer experience. One of these changes was to modify the sequence of the user experience flow to address two key problems we were experiencing: A large number of people dropped off before or sales team gathered enough information to follow-up; and when this happened people lost their vehicle configuration and any personal information they provided.
The duality of problems being solved by this one move was strategic in its implementation because it required minimal effort by front-end and back-end engineers yet offered a considerable return for both the business and customer. Furthermore, this UX change happened at the start of the checkout journey, and gave us an opportunity to set a mental precedence for people and prime them for the experience they were about to begin.
Until we simplified this first step, and focused on asking people for only their email. Customers were required to enter all of their personal information as the first step. This met over 90% of people would drop off before their order, and its corresponding vehicle configuration were saved in a database. This approach minimized the amount of information a customer was required to provide before Volvo’s CRM could contact customers for future order completion.
Click to see the screens in light-box
Cleary Communicating The Real Price Is Why Customers Value Care by Volvo
Estimated Taxes Experience for the Care by Volvo Service
Following a presentation with our UX researcher, an insight stood out.
“The excitement of getting a new car is eclipsed by the anxiety about the price and possibility of get cheated by a dealer.” - A Current Volvo Customer
When discussing the development of the checkout experience we understood the importance of this insight and its impact on the overall impression people have when buying a vehicle. It seemed we had a real opportunity to change how people felt and we believed that changing how people felt could impact overall perception and business for the better. By providing people with the real price that included taxes and fees, we gave customers a sense of control and clarity throughout the buying process. This concept deals directly with how can we make customers more comfortable in buying a car in a new way.
From a UX perspective, it was important we integrated this idea of showing the real price into the experience naturally and use the customers normal behavior to over delivered on expectations.
A team of tax specialists at Volvo developed a system to calculate the monthly vehicle price with estimated taxes and fees included we could use and to date, the system in place could estimate this information with over 85% accuracy. This development led our concept to be included in the Care by Volvo product roadmap, along with the backdrop concept above for 2020.
This animation was used to illustrate the interaction between the form field and the estimated taxes value for the sake of creating a conversation with the front-end and back-end engineering teams.
Process of leveraging our UX Researcher’s Work of mapping the Pain Points, Wins, Suggestion, and Key Take Aways in the Customer’s Journey for buying a car.
Explore | Narrow Down | Decide | Purchase
When do our customers need to know the actual monthly
price of their vehicle with taxes and fees included?
A Quick and Effective Exit Survey
UX Prototype for Qualitative Research
To improve the resolution of customer feedback in Care By Volvo’s product lifecycle I spent a little time prototyping a streamlined UX for a customer exit survey. My goal here was to illustrate how the specific choices in this experience can enhance feedback resolution by focusing on a swift interaction that advance people through the survey quickly and lets them submit their answers at any point. This survey framework, gives data analysts a platform to ask the valuable questions, that gather relevant, qualitative data, which enrich the overall inputs that are used to shape a better service for the customer.
A Future Vision of the Mobile App
Care by Volvo Mobile App Visual Design
Below are a set of basic prototypes that I offered to the brand design team to illustrate how the Care by Volvo app could look and feel moving forward. These explorations were meant as a counter balance to the problem-solving-heavy work that had been done for Care By Volvo, and were meant to offer up some aesthetic precedence for how the Care by Volvo experience could continue to develop — subtly, constrained, and making use of the videos and imagery commissioned by Volvo. The videos are too large for web, so downloading them works best for viewing further.
Pre-Ordering Volvo’s First Electric Car
XC40 Recharge Pre-Order Web Experience
As an exciting new chapter in the history of the company, Volvo announced the production of its first fully-electric vehicle in October of 2019. The XC40 Recharge. As a member of their digital design team, I designed this pre-ordering experience appended to the marketing site. The goal of this experience was simple but critical to convert early customers into future owners. My goal for this work, as of much of my work with Volvo, was to make the task of buying a car online as simple as possible for people. Boiled down to its essence, this experience gave customers the most straight forward path to submit their deposit and confirm their orders.
