Portfolio of Christina Fowler

MVP

I joined BCA to work on a new app for vehicle appraisals, known as GENUS. I led a team of two other designers and a UX researcher during the discovery and intial ideation phases. We began by understanding each of the 225 checks and what details need to be captured by the user. Diving deep into the data allowed us to identify trends and groupings that would become the core interaction.

The initial research revealed some key problems with the existing app. Although it was well integrated into other BCA products it often got in the way of the appraiser completing their job. We were able to produce a number of protoypes to present to stakeholders and then to users during observational research.

As part of the discovery phase I also ran a number of stakeholder workshops to generate ideas of how vehicle assessment data could be captured. Through the research and workshops we defined five goals that we hoped to achieve:

• Reduce taps: Inspections should be faster and less effort. Less taps and more options in view.
• Improved data: Inspectors spend a great deal of time looking for the right component and get very frustrated with missing data.
• Easily add components: One of the main gripes with the existing app is that missing components cannot be requested or added.
• Respect the experience of inspectors: Stop hand holding and ensure that we respect the experience of mechanics and experienced inspectors.
• Flexibility: Allow inspectors to assess a vehicle in the way that works for the individual.

In order to meet these goals we began to address the tone of voice of questions and determined that assessment tasks should be written as statements not instructions. For example, "Check if the engine contains no leaks or damages" becomes "The engine has no leaks or damage." The benefits of this were:

• Pass/Fail answers are more natural.
• Assessors are confirming a statement, rather than being instructed, therefore improving accountability.
• Statements are more respectful to the expertise of assessors.

I also worked to ensure consistency in how components were named. For example, some areas displayed "lamp" while others showed "light", similarly with offside/driver side, glass/window and more. All of these variations were united with one consistent name.

These principles drove the project forward quickly and we had created a solid UI foundation for the developers to begin to build the app. Progress within the team was good but unfortunately at this point of the development there were some dependencies which halted the project and meant it couldn't launch.

Our user testing at this stage of the project showed that buttons and other elements were quite small on the screen. This prompted us to review the UI and see where we could make things larger without significantly affecting the layout of the screen.

Vision Piece

Due to the swift pace of the MVP I was limited on time to explore the UI interactions and polish. Once the development was underway I was able to spend my time working with a creative UI designer to develop a vision piece for the GENUS app. This gave us an ideal interface to work towards and I began to bring improvements into the working design wherever possible.

Simultaneously we also worked on some promotional posters which would be displayed in the assessment halls and would familiarise users with the improved language changes we made to the data.

Cosmetic Appraisals

Once the vision piece was in a good place I began discovery on cosmetic appraisals. The existing app for cosmetic appraisals was 10 years old and little had been updated in the time, including the vehicle options and other data that users could choose from.

The discovery phase revealed that different BCA branches had wildly different assessment times and the number of vehicle returns was at an all time high. Due to COVID, buyers were no longer able to view a vehicle in person and the reports that were provided to them were not meeting their requirements. Buyers wanted more detail about a vehicle and more confidence in the consistency of reports.

Through a number of workshops I discovered that stakeholders were very reluctant to change the existing process and they didn't want any additional time to be added to an appraisal. We therefore took the approach, for the first phase of cosmetic appraisals, to improve the options that users could select from but to rebuild the existing interaction as closely as possible.

The prototype of the design work was tested on site with BCA's cosmetic appraisers. However, at this point the project was placed on hold and we switched to another part of the vehicle lifecycle.

GENUS Product Strategy

We were now a year into the project and unfortunately we were yet to launch the app. In order to keep stakeholder confidence high I worked to communicate the product strategy through a slide deck and presented it at a number of company wide meetings. Looking to the future of vehicle assessments, the deck focused on the strategy for what BCA hope to achieve with GENUS and how to get there.

The goal of this project was to work towards a united future for inspections and appraisals. Our ambition is to replace the outdated technology that many appraisals are using and replace it with a more united approach that focuses on sharing, reliability and continuous improvement.

• Sharing data: Adding to the Digital Vehicle Record at every step, each appraisal will improve the accuracy of what we know about a vehicle.
• Reliable tech: Continuous improvement through iterative app development. Removing our reliance on third parties through in-house development.
• One team mindset: Unite appraisal teams with shared goals. Build trust between branches and appraisal teams.

Where are we today?

The life cycle of a vehicle from first-touch to remarketing includes a large number of different apps. We are working to remove many of those apps and replace them with GENUS wherever possible.

These are the core features that differentiate GENUS from what has come before...

• Data connection overhaul: I worked closely with a Solution Architect from the start to remove inconsistencies from the data and improve the connections between component, condition, severity and repair method.
• Faster component selection: By removing fiddly select boxes and exposing a larger list of choices to select from, users can find the component they need more easily. This speeds up the assessment process and makes reporting issues less of a chore.
• Regular user testing: The research team have supported the development of GENUS by regularly visiting sites to test prototypes and work in progress with BCA and RAC appraisers.

Mechanical Appraisals

At this point we pivoted to work on another mechanical assessment that BCA outsources to the RAC. The BCA Assured assessments covered four question sets which were very similar the 225 checks. Again, users would need to answer a set of questions and select the component and condition for any problems that were found.

Stakeholder workshops revealed the stakeholders were eager to move away from the third party app that they were currently using. They also wanted the ability to capture more details, improve the data set and allow users to take photos. All of which were features we had already built into GENUS and we hoped would reduce the number of vehicle returns once it was rolled out.

Working with a junior designer we focused on the questions that didn't follow the typical data capture including mileage and fault code search. I also focused on improving the UI design to match the vision piece. The spacing, button styles, fonts and colours were all improved although the basic layout remained largely the same.

Vehicle Appraisals

When a vehicle first arrives at a BCA site, documents are usually separated from the car and a group of back office staff will capture the document details onto an internal system which was very dated. In order to improve this process and move away from the legacy system we began to look at how the GENUS app could apply to this situation.

This saw a big change to the product strategy for the app, previously it had been intended to replace all of the different appraisals across BCA, but now it is expanding to the entire vehicle journey through the business.

As with the other phases of the project, I conducted stakeholder workshops to understand the user requirements and undertook an impact vs effort assessment to define the priorities.

This enabled me to see how much of the existing interface could be reused and how much needed to be designed from scratch. Again, I focused on redesigning the exceptions however, due to the simplicity of the GENUS design we were able to reuse much of the interface that had been designed before.

The results of the user testing were very positive with some changes to the data and order of questions required. This work is now in development and is due to be rolled out during Autumn 2022.