Quickar
An Android Mobile Car Rental App
Methods
Interview, Survey, Competitive Analysis, Affinity Diagram, Persona, Work Flow, Prototyping, Usability Testing (Remote and In-Person)
Tools
Axure RP, Sketch, InVision, UserTesting.com, Quatri
Group Members
Xin Su, Tingting Cai, Yan Qi
About
Our project deals with rent-a-car business domain and provides a platform of multi-agent dynamic scheduling solution for users. Our product is a car-rental application running on Android phones. Some specific requirements for cars as well as drivers scheduling, developed multi-agent and ontology based approach for real time scheduling, and insurance reference are taken into consideration. Employing usability testing techniques with actual-end users, threeround usability tests attempts to assess the efficacy of our app as well as user attitudes toward it. We hope our proposed approach can be effective and have a significant potential to reduce costs and save time for users.
About
Process
The Problem
Renting a car can be a time-and-effort-consuming process. To find ideal rental cars, you oftentimes need to spend significant amount of time searching on the internet, looking at multiple sources, comparing locations and prices, and then making decisions on reservations. Moreover, when you finally get up to the counter and start filling out the paperwork, things can become more complicated as the counter agents throw out a bunch of options and extras you do not think you need.
The Solution- Quickar
Like all existing car rental apps, our app should include comprehensive information of all the car rental locations across the U.S. and their stocks, and should also allow users to filter and compare all the available options until they find the ones that best fit their needs. Furthermore, to differentiate our app with the others, we decided to endow the app with the capability of managing car rental activities such as reservations, check-ins and returns for the users, though this will require some physical setups to make things function well. All in all, we want to make the on-site car renting experience occurs mostly between the renters and the cars. If the counter is the part that generates most pain points during the car rental process, we should definitely skip or replace it.
- Integrate all the car rental information
- Filter and compare
- Add/read reviews
- Handle all paperwork digitally and remotely,
- Sync
Some Features
Project Idea
An app that allows users to go through the entire car rental process with their phones, in an easier and quicker way.
User Research
Competitive Analysis
In this project, we picked 5 car rental apps with the highest ratings by users on both Android and IOS platforms as our competitive apps.
--------Top 10 Best Car Rental Apps for Android & IOS’
User Interview
6 Participants
2 Participants
with prior experience in renting cars
without prior experience in renting cars
-Tell me your best and worst experience of renting a car in USA
-Which part is the most time-consuming/effort-consuming in renting a car?
-Do you have any preference over some car rental app, website or other tools, that you think it is helpful?
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-Give them a scenario: Rent a car in LA
- How would you find information and make a reservation?
- What factors would you consider when making a decision on which car to rent?
- Imagine how could you pick up the car and return it
- Imagine how could you make the payment
- Imagine how could you purchase insurance
- Which part is the most difficult and time-consuming as you could imagine?
- What other issues you might concern about?
-How would you like [Feature 1][Feature 2][Feature 3][Feature 4][Feature 5]?
-How would you like [Feature 1][Feature 2][Feature 3][Feature 4][Feature 5]?
Design Decisions
Consolidate the interview results using affinity diagrams
Describe your image.
Describe your image.
Persona and Journey Map
Design
Work Flow
White Board Sketch
Low-fidelity Wireframes
Test and Redesign
60+ screens and 4-round user tests
Round 1
1 The small bubble, representing the function to contact customer service, confused a few users. To avoid ambiguity, we changed the icon a little bit by adding a question mark in the dialog box.
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2 Several users complained about tapping back and forth to select dates and times for pick-up and drop-off, so we combined both date and time selection functions to enable users to select dates and times for pick-up and drop-off within the samescreen, as shown in the next figure.
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3 Users without previous car rental experience raised questions about the ’25 years old’ option.We did not change it because it is a business requirement or industrial rule, of which renters under 25 may be charged for underage fees, so the prices would change in the search results screen if the user input an age under 25
Home Screen of low-fi and medium-fi prototypes
1 According to users’ feedbacks, the position of the filter in the first prototype was ‘against the
convention’ and should better be placed in the upper right corner of the screen, so we did what
they had requested and also added a ‘funnel ’metaphor to it.
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2. All the testers were not interested in viewing the search results in the map view and suggested us to remove that function. For people who were confused about labels of categories or failed to get the meaning of sliding to left or right, we decided to leave the design as it was.
Search Results Screen of low-fi and medium-fi prototypes
Detailed Information Page of low-fi and medium-fi prototypes
1 The words “due now” confused testers as they thought they were supposed to pay it immediately so we changed the wording and removed the notification of ‘free cancellation’ to the bottom of the screen so that users could clearly see these instructions.
2 Moreover, experienced drivers felt that they would like to look into some information about insurance options so that they would possibly deal with less paperwork when they get to the counter once they had picked an insurance plan in advance. Considering this as an excellent idea, we added this function in the later redesign.
Confirm Booking Screen of low-fi and medium-fi prototypes
1 In the dates& time section, arrows to imply pick-up or drop-off were confusing to users so that we
deleted them.
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2 Some users proposed that they may need to edit the driver’s information so we add the edit button in the next round.
3 Users feedback showed that they might want to return to the home screen or check their bookings.
Therefore, as you can see in our high-fidelity prototype, a new screen to indicate successful booking status is used for users’ different needs.
Users’ feedback told us they liked our idea. According to their reviews, we refined our car detailed screen, confirmation screen. It is suggested by users to create a dialogue to indicate successful booking and highlight the new generated booking with a small red dot, which will disappear after clicking my booking screen. As for shortcomings we must overcome, the filter button and customer service phone icon would be replaced with more suitable ones. Besides, we added several icons to indicate the configuration of cars, such as the number of seats, the engine type and air conditioning.
Round 2
Date&Time Selection Screen of High-fi Prototypes
1 The time selection drop list can hardly be observed by some of our users. In this way, time selection drop list was designed to pop out at once the pick-up date so it was attractive enough to users.
2 After selecting pick-up date and time, it would automatically jump to drop-off date and time selection, which wasn’t perceived by quite a few new users. In the next iteration we modified this screen so that the transition would be more conspicuous.
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3 one user pointed out that after pick-up time location she would incline to press “done” button. To deal with this, we modified the instruction on this button.
Car Details Screen of High-fi Prototypes
Due to previous car browse screen, blue dots here conveyed some false meaning that if they slide to right they would see different car types. Here we removed the dots and added some thumbnails of cars.
Damage Inspection Screens of High-fi Prototypes
1 The car inspection is a necessary step in car-rental process, which is usually done through paperwork. Our application simplified this process and people can conduct this step on mobile, as is shown in the left one.
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2 Dr. Seay provided feedback that we can offer the photo-taking function to submit the damage image for severe damage. Taking this into consideration, we classified damage as mild, moderate and severe and added picture-taking and submission function.
Check-in Screens of High-fi Prototypes
1 Check-in function has been getting good marks from our users in each round of user test. Users could scan their credit card to save time.
2 Users were able to select a specific car, whose detailed information were available 24 hours before preset pick-up time. This application has risen in users’ opinion due to this function because users were pretty satisfied they could look into more details of a car and secure it so they wouldn’t be afraid of bad luck to be assigned with an awful car.
3 Dr. Seay suggests to add an upgrade option to increase opportunity to make profit.
Whereas, there were some demands of users that we couldn’t meet. More than one people proposed the sort-by function. However, we didn’t have adequate data items to support ‘sort by’ function. The searching results were aligned from lowest price to highest price by default.
Round 3
Insurance Page of High-fi Prototypes
1 Here we removed language options, which users considered valueless.
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2 There were four types of insurance, which were not sorted by coverage or price, which might convey fault meaning to users. Users couldn’t understand it was multi-selection mode. Our redesign of insurance selection screen can be seen in the second and third figure. We changed the explanation of the insurance selection- ‘Choose the insurance plan(s) you want to be covered’ so that users could understand they could purchase more than one type of insurance.
Damage Inspection Screens of High-fi Prototypes
1 We set this step as optional, for some users stated they preferred to do it through paperwork at the counter of the car-rental company. As is shown in the second figure, the Skip option was added to this screen.
Welcome Screens of High-fi Prototypes
It is evitable that new users might be confused about what is the next step for they don’t know the whole process. Therefore, Welcome screens were created to introduce steps and the feature of our app
Browse Screen and Detailed Information page of High-fi Prototypes
1 Because there are different addresses available for certain car type of one company within one city, a map is to show location availability.
When asked the first question ‘what frustrated you most about this prototype/app’, a large proportion of users told us this application was satisfying for it was simple and clear. There were still some people complaining about the long process of the application. Also, several people failed to complete some certain tasks, inevitably. As for the question ‘how would you improve this app if possible’, the majority of users responded that they would leave as it was. Some ideas about the font size, sort-by function were also included in these responses. To sum up, our test results proved that our design was appreciated by large quantity of people and it satisfied users’ demands basically.
User Comments and Conclusion
user friendly, intuitive interface and booking system easy to use.
I liked the concept and that it was a much faster way of taking care of something that is usually a hassle.
I like being able to check in 24 hours before. The concept of the time saving app is fantastic. I hate standing in line and waiting for the car to be cleaned. I feel this would give me more security.
What they like
What they don't like
I thought overall the app was quite accessible. There wasn't anything that frustrated me with the exception of the 'estimated' total as I like to know what I need to pay upfront rather then go through the while process and discover I need to pay a different amount.
Reduce the text that the user needs to read, to a minimum.
I would make the interaction more free for the user to scroll and tap different buttons. I would also hide most of the digits of the credit card when viewing the summary.
Finally, we get a good score in the system usability scale survey. Most of the respondents are strangers online, which enables us to consider the result as an objective score to reflect the quality of our app. Some users left messages saying that they would like to view detailed information of more pages, such as the insurance page. Given more time, we will continue the iteration, improve the visual design of the interface, and provide more screens to cater to our audience’ needs.