CarlaCare: Smart Reservation Check-in

CarlaCare: Smart Reservation Check-in

Addressed user confusion on rental pick-ups by creating Carla Care Pick-up Assistant, an interactive guide that enhances user understanding and reduces cancellations.

Addressed user confusion on rental pick-ups by creating Carla Care Pick-up Assistant, an interactive guide that enhances user understanding and reduces cancellations.

In Collaboration with

Carla

Carla
Carla

Role

Product Designer & Product Manager & User Researcher

Product Designer & Product Manager & User Researcher
Product Designer & Product Manager & User Researcher

Company size

20+
20+
20+

Duration

5 weeks
5 weeks
5 weeks

State

Launched
Launched
Launched

Team

2 Mobile, 3 Backend Developers
2 Mobile, 3 Backend Developers
2 Mobile, 3 Backend Developers

Try it

Overview

As a product designer at Carla, I was driven to resolve the pain points that customers faced during the car rental pick-up process. Many users were unaware of the prerequisites for a successful pick-up, leading to frustration, confusion, and post-rental cancellations. To address this, I led the development of the Carla Care Pick-up Assistant - a feature that immerses users in an interactive and enjoyable flow akin to a "choose your own adventure" experience.

Highlights

  • A personalized tree flow

  • Completely controllable from the backend

  • Different journeys for users with different risk levels

  • 3 user research projects in 2 weeks (as a single researcher)

  • Start -> Finish conversion rate 86%

  • Reduced counter-cancellation rates by 23%

  • Increased user satisfaction

  • Provided valuable information about our users.

Challenge

Car rental services have become an indispensable aspect of modern travel, offering users a flexible and convenient mode of transportation.

However, the car rental process can sometimes prove to be a challenge, particularly for first-time renters or those unfamiliar with the rental policies. Users often complete their reservations through third-party apps like Carla, only to encounter various issues at the rental counter that result in failed pick-ups and dissatisfaction with the platform.

Before the inception of Carla Care, our team had already explored numerous solutions to address the various pain points associated with the car rental process, which constituted the broader issue.

Solution

The Pick-up Assistant offers personalized onboarding and checkpoints, guiding users through the necessary steps for a successful pick-up and ensuring they have the required documents and information before arriving at the rental office. Our team's diligent efforts were rewarded with a significant decrease in post-rental cancellations among users who completed the guide and an impressive 86% completion rate to date. I am proud of our solution and the impact it has had on our users, and I am eager to share the product development and design journey behind this pivotal feature in my career.

Overview

As a product designer at Carla, I was driven to resolve the pain points that customers faced during the car rental pick-up process. Many users were unaware of the prerequisites for a successful pick-up, leading to frustration, confusion, and post-rental cancellations. To address this, I led the development of the Carla Care Pick-up Assistant - a feature that immerses users in an interactive and enjoyable flow akin to a "choose your own adventure" experience.

Highlights

  • A personalized tree flow

  • Completely controllable from the backend

  • Different journeys for users with different risk levels

  • 3 user research projects in 2 weeks (as a single researcher)

  • Start -> Finish conversion rate 86%

  • Reduced counter-cancellation rates by 23%

  • Increased user satisfaction

  • Provided valuable information about our users.

Challenge

Car rental services have become an indispensable aspect of modern travel, offering users a flexible and convenient mode of transportation.

However, the car rental process can sometimes prove to be a challenge, particularly for first-time renters or those unfamiliar with the rental policies. Users often complete their reservations through third-party apps like Carla, only to encounter various issues at the rental counter that result in failed pick-ups and dissatisfaction with the platform.

Before the inception of Carla Care, our team had already explored numerous solutions to address the various pain points associated with the car rental process, which constituted the broader issue.

Solution

The Pick-up Assistant offers personalized onboarding and checkpoints, guiding users through the necessary steps for a successful pick-up and ensuring they have the required documents and information before arriving at the rental office. Our team's diligent efforts were rewarded with a significant decrease in post-rental cancellations among users who completed the guide and an impressive 86% completion rate to date. I am proud of our solution and the impact it has had on our users, and I am eager to share the product development and design journey behind this pivotal feature in my career.

Overview

As a product designer at Carla, I was driven to resolve the pain points that customers faced during the car rental pick-up process. Many users were unaware of the prerequisites for a successful pick-up, leading to frustration, confusion, and post-rental cancellations. To address this, I led the development of the Carla Care Pick-up Assistant - a feature that immerses users in an interactive and enjoyable flow akin to a "choose your own adventure" experience.

Highlights

  • A personalized tree flow

  • Completely controllable from the backend

  • Different journeys for users with different risk levels

  • 3 user research projects in 2 weeks (as a single researcher)

  • Start -> Finish conversion rate 86%

  • Reduced counter-cancellation rates by 23%

  • Increased user satisfaction

  • Provided valuable information about our users.

Challenge

Car rental services have become an indispensable aspect of modern travel, offering users a flexible and convenient mode of transportation.

However, the car rental process can sometimes prove to be a challenge, particularly for first-time renters or those unfamiliar with the rental policies. Users often complete their reservations through third-party apps like Carla, only to encounter various issues at the rental counter that result in failed pick-ups and dissatisfaction with the platform.

Before the inception of Carla Care, our team had already explored numerous solutions to address the various pain points associated with the car rental process, which constituted the broader issue.

Solution

The Pick-up Assistant offers personalized onboarding and checkpoints, guiding users through the necessary steps for a successful pick-up and ensuring they have the required documents and information before arriving at the rental office. Our team's diligent efforts were rewarded with a significant decrease in post-rental cancellations among users who completed the guide and an impressive 86% completion rate to date. I am proud of our solution and the impact it has had on our users, and I am eager to share the product development and design journey behind this pivotal feature in my career.

86%

86%

Total Conversion

~40%

~40%

Increased efficiency in customer support

23%

Reduced Cancellation

Process

Discovery

Approximately 49% of users who reserved a car through Carla could not successfully pick up their vehicles. The vast majority were left stranded at the rental counter, unable to continue their travel plans. This led to numerous negative reviews, support requests, and disputes, compelling us to find an effective solution to significantly improve customer experience.

To better comprehend where the problem lies, I analyzed refund requests, identifying the major issues and categorizing them into three groups:



Our partnership team consistently addressed supplier-side issues, and as a UX designer, I recognized that addressing "Consumer Side Issues" fell within our realm of responsibility. By effectively informing and guiding our users, we aimed to prevent such issues from arising and create a more user-centered and appealing experience.

The challenge we faced was striking a balance between our business needs and user needs. While we were aware that certain circumstances could prevent users from renting a car, we were hesitant to communicate this openly, as doing so might lead to a loss of reservations.

Define

The most prominent issue was the lack of a credit card at the counter, which accounted for 40% of all failed pick-ups. Although this was not a new revelation, various attempts to address this problem over the years yielded mixed results.

We can also see that it's a common problem, especially in the US by looking at Google Trends.

If we could diminish the effect of this problem, we could help our users have a better car rental experience and also benefit the business.


After examining several experiments with various approaches, I realized that our primary shortcoming was our lack of understanding of our customers. We had limited knowledge of their preferred payment methods and other crucial details that could have informed our strategies. 

Research: What's the reason for counter failure? What are the strategies employed by successful users?

Method:
In-app survey (Payment methods)
Follow-up interviews with selected respondents.
Screener survey to shortlist users meeting specific criteria: living in the US, English speakers, no upcoming reservations, no credit card
User interviews with users: successful (4) and failed (5) pick-ups.



Strategies employed by the success group:

a. Contacting rental companies ahead of time to inquire about policies.

b. Seeking out rental companies that have softer policies for debit cards.

c. Making reservations with a friend or family member's credit card.

d. Arranging for the rental company to charge a debit card with a higher deposit as a workaround.

e. Having the required documents with them. 


Pain points faced by the fail group:

a. Lack of clear information on payment policies during the online reservation process.

b. Inability to filter rental companies based on payment method preferences.

c. Discovering the credit-card-only policy at the rental counter, leading to frustration and canceled reservations.


A screenshot from one of our interviews. This was actually in the prototype testing stage.

Design Phase

As the agile startup environment demands, we had limited time (around 2 weeks) to design and develop a solution. That’s why we needed to slice our ideas into a roadmap. 

The main idea

  • Design a guide to walk them through the necessary steps from the moment they make a res to pick up (then ideally to drop off).

  • Present this guide right after they complete a reservation and move on to the reservations page. 

  • To make the journey less cumbersome, try to make it as easy as possible to understand why are they doing it by using humor.

  • Ask them questions as a checklist, and move forward to various flows when they answer. (Might ask them to upload documents or transfer deposit according to their level of risk)

With our software engineering lead, we came up with a system that offers us the freedom to completely control this flow from the backend. We could add or remove questions, change the conditional logic freely, and change or remove pictures.

Another advantage of this was to be able to access users' answers by their user IDs so that we can offer them personalized customer support when in need.


Another anecdote from the design process is the part where we segmented users according to their answers and the number of days till their pick-up. By segmenting users into 3 groups Low Risk, Medium Risk, and High Risk, we showed them 3 different versions of the last page.


I have designed the feature onboarding which is humorous by design and it was very much liked by users in the user interviews. The challenge here was to translate these witty sentences into 11 other languages. As I was also responsible for the localizations, I reached out to native speakers of each language and together we came up with hilarious solutions.

Later, we found three slides were too many for feature onboarding. We streamlined it by removing the middle slide

After the first prototype testing, we realized that the flow was too long and boring for users. Also, they thought that there was a lot to read. That's why the following changes were made to the MVP:

  • A new page was added to the middle of the flow as a checkpoint - celebrating the user for coming that far and telling them the positive aspects of their answers.

  • Questions and answers were reviewed to make them as digestible as possible. Instead of having a long question and short answers, we converted to the 'select the answer that applies to you' format. For example



  • I have a credit card to pay at the counter.

  • I don't have a credit card, but I have a debit or prepaid card to pay at the counter.

  • I plan to pay with cash at the counter.

This worked better.


We also tried to implement one of our first and craziest ideas later, as a sequel to Carla Care. That is "Carla Credit Card". Remember at the beginning, in the ideation part, one of our ideas was to help them get a credit card? We have partnered with a string of fintech companies and offered our users a type of credit card that can only be used for their reservation from Carla. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to go into the details of that project as part of my verbal agreement. However, I can say that it was a good design challenge to create most functions of a finance app inside a travel app.