Defining the problem
SpotHero has successfully parked over 20+ million cars, many through parking garage operators selling their inventory (spots) that would have otherwise gone vacant. As SpotHero grows, more and more customers rely on the app and website, and at the same time comes an increase in painful and roundabout parking experiences. One of the most frustrating parking situations is when a customer shows up to their spot -- only to be turned away by the garage or lot due to lack of available spots. (How can this be, the customer asks). A common root cause of a "lot full" comes from garage operators either overbooking their spots (much like an airline may oversell flights beyond capacity), or due to unintentional mishandling of their inventory by not updating their SpotHero Control Panel. |
But first, some product strategy My team (the Efficiency Squad)'s mission is to save SpotHero time and money, to which we assigned two KPI's respectively: |
1) Average Handling Time (AHT). |
2) Calls Per Park (CPP). |
Together, my Product Manager and I conducted focus groups with the customer service team in order to learn about the range of pain-points across their different types of cases (not just Rebooking). I then aggregated these pain points. |
Prioritizing with the RICE model The next step was to prioritize which pain points our squad should tackle first in order to create the largest impact on reducing AHT or CPP. The prioritization framework we used was the RICE model, which we each did individually. Unfortunately, I can't disclose our RICE numbers. |
After comparing our two RICE models, my PM and I agreed that focusing on AHT enabled us to be most impactful and better infer which pain-points are costing more time and money to the company.
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Discovery The goal of Discovery for the Rebook project was to complement the existing "Initiation doc" written by my PM, which includes goals, constraints, and potential use cases to address. For me, the most important aspect of Discovery is to go in with the assumption that my existing knowledge and use cases can be completely overturned and disproven, and that there is always something unexpected to learn. With this mindset, I decided to lead an affinity wall with my PM and design team. I prepared post-it notes that included various quotes and ideas from our focus groups and customer service slack channels, such as: "Customers know where they want to go but want to know all of the options" |
After further analysis and synthesis from the affinity wall, I began noticing that certain pain-points affect certain workflows (i.e. types of customer cases). |
"If our customer service team adopted more intuitive Admin tools that matched their most time-consuming workflows, they will become more efficient, less stressed, and have more time to attend to our backlog of cases (and thus saving the company money)." |
Qualitative data from our focus groups and customer service slack channels asserted that Rebooking a customer (e.g. due to a "lot full") was consistently one of the most "stressful" and "time-consuming" cases. Quantitative data (in seconds) also complemented this finding. |
Gathering more data points
Our customer service slack channels gave us a balance of quantitative and qualitative information. I was able to count the frequency with which our customer service heroes posed questions or escalations related to rebooking. Certain emojis and positive or negative adjectives were key indicators of how well their rebooking experience went. |
Just enough research
I knew I had just enough research that I could confidently map out the current rebook flow to present to project stakeholders, and be able to identify potential pain-points to be solved by design or process changes. One challenging aspect of mapping the flow was to represent the hero as the primary user, while also not neglecting the needs and pain-points of the SpotHero customer. |
User observations and interviews
A fortunate aspect of being a product designer on SpotHero's efficiency squad is having direct access to stakeholders and users on the same floor of the building. I was able to maximize this opportunity and sit down at the desks of four customer service representatives to shadow and observe their workflows. Going into these sessions, I had prepared a template list of questions regarding the Rebook flow. For example, What is working well and what do you wish was present in the workflow to help you be more efficient with rebooking? |
Overall findings
Based on my 4 sessions of observation + interviews (as well as Slack), there were overlapping requirements that heroes employed while rebooking for a new spot. I distilled these requirements down to 4 criteria. Four criteria for the new spot: |
Additional findings
Aside from the criteria for a new spot, here are a few additional findings I found important since they reveal user behavior: |
1. Some customer service representatives started searching for a new spot with the map, and some started with the list view results. The split between these two were close to 50/50. |
Design goal
With each iteration of my designs, my focus is to tackle each of the findings and spot criteria in a prioritized order. Again, this order was based on estimated impact to reducing average handle time of the case). In terms of the customer, there were a few design goals I tried to keep in mind throughout my iterations: 1. Ease any doubts from the customer by being proactive about what the system (admin page is doing). For example, proactively communicate that SpotHero covers the difference in cost if a more expensive spot is chosen. If a cheaper spot is chosen, the customer service rep should tell the customer exactly how much is being refunded and to what payment source. Early explorations of the main Rebook screen:
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1. Added in details of original reservation in the flyout panel so that it's visible in this view. Heroes were having difficulty recalling these original reservation details, which are important to compare to the newly rebooked spot. |
Usability testing
With the help of a stakeholder, I recruited five customer service representatives to run through an interactive prototype I had made on InVision (similar to the designs shown in the above video). Insights revealed more about the mental models of the customer service representatives. Here are the most important findings: |
1. Some UI patterns did not afford discoverability. I brainstormed with my design team to come up with more intuitive icons and visual patterns. |
Throughout my research and design process, I take developer collaboration very seriously. Here are a few salient points where I made sure to involve my front-end and back-end developers:
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1. Usability testing. All devs and our QA analyst assisted with note-taking and asking follow-up questions. |
Next steps
1. Adding in automation of gray-out's (temporarily not allowing customers to book garages and lots that are reported full by other customers). |