Making Car Repairs Worry-free

Discovery

The Problem Space

Understanding Public Perception

Most Americans have no idea what’s going on under the hood of their vehicle. Coupled with the fact that, compared to 1970, the number of licensed drivers in the United States has doubled to 210 million, it was clear why public paranoia over auto repair continued to plague motorists. As Audra Fordin explained in her article, “The Six Reasons Why People Feel Anxious about Auto Repair”, negative perceptions could be fueled by any of the following criteria:

• a lack of automotive knowledge

• financial constraints

• lack of availability

• previous bad experiences

• negative stories

• not fully understanding what’s being repaired

Providing a Powerful Experience

According to an article from the Harvard Business Review, addressing emotional triggers was the key providing a powerful customer experience. Their four-step strategy involved:

1. Identifying emotional triggers

2. Responding early to intense emotions

3. Enhancing customers’ control

4. Hiring the right people and prepare them for the role.

“Customers’ assessments of quality and value, buying decisions, and recommendations are all influenced by emotions (Harvard Business Review).”

Talking to Motorists

I published a 10-question survey to provide a face to the swaths of data, reports and journals I had been reading. The survey was designed to do two things:

1. Participant Screening – 2 questions
   Ideal candidates only had to meet two criteria: they had to own a car they were financially responsible for and, in the last five years, they needed to have personally experienced at least one car repair journey. 37 motorists responded, ranging from their early 20’s to their late 60’s. After going through all their responses, I set up 5 interviews with the broadest range of candidates available to me.
   

2. Quantitative Data – 8 questions
   I wanted to know what commonalities, if any, there were between my respondents and the stats/perceptions I had read about. Additionally, I used this as an opportunity to gather quantitative data on subjects I wasn’t able to locate myself. The following discoveries provided the earliest foundations for identifying the target users, and influenced the questions I asked during my interviews.

Synthesizing What I Learned

I used several affinity mapping techniques to help identify emotional triggers, negative patterns, and user goals.

STEP 1: Distillation

Distill the interviewees responses into 5 manageable categories:
Actions • Emotions • Likes • Dislikes • Additional Observations

STEP 2: Identifying Patterns

The next step was a challenge because my focus was too broad in the beginning. I was tracking too many things at once and my maps, though colorful and dazzling to look at, were fruitless. Feeling overwhelmed, I decided to focus on something simpler – “likes” and “dislikes”. The benefits of a narrowed focus weren’t obvious at the time, but in doing so, I was able to identify patterns and slowly work my way up to the big picture.

STEP 3: Building A Map

The need for a visual representation of their collective journey wasn’t fully recognized until I reached the end of Step 2. Simply put, if you want to identify where triggers and patterns occur, you need a map. I constructed the map by chronologically organizing the actions into groups based on their similarities. I refined the map even further by removing irrelevant edge cases. Having identified a surprising amount of overlap in the top three actions, I used tape to show how everything tied together. The finished map revealed a peculiar funnel shape I wasn’t expecting. This suggested users with different first-reactions are more common than originally expected.

STEP 4: Seeing the Big Picture

At the beginning of this process, I believed negative patterns were somehow more important than the positive ones. This perspective, as I came to realize, was flawed because it distracted me from seeing what was already working. I used this new realization to assess three things:

• Were any positives & negatives correlated?

• If they were, were there opportunities to leverage and reinforce the positives?

• Where are the emotional triggers?

“The most annoying thing is waiting around for shops to call you back. After a while you start to wonder if they forgot about you. ”

–Interview Participant

The Target Audience