Enhancing mobility services for BMW
Client: BMW / DriveNow
Timeframe: Sept 2011 - Feb 2012 (6-months)
Task: Service Design
Location: Munich, Germany / Delft, The Netherlands
Activities: Client communication; Research; Strategy; Service Design; Implementation plan; Video Production; App design; Presentation.
DriveNow is a BMW operated car sharing service active in cities such as Munich, San Francisco and London. As part of an interdisciplinary masters project we were asked to develop new mobility service concepts that would enhance their car sharing experience and platform. As an emerging sector with competitors such as ZipCar and Car2Go, our client wanted to differentiate themselves as a premium alternative through better vehicles and membership options, and by leveraging the BMW brand. Some ideas our client wanted us to explore included the integration of urban transportation infrastructure with car sharing, on boarding new customers into the BMW ecosystem, and exploring detailed customer journeys on how they would use the service. Because our team was based in the Netherlands, we agreed with our client to design the service using the Randstad mega region (area between Amsterdam and Rotterdam) as our primary design focus.
Project Planning
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The Process
1. Research & Discover > 2. Design > 3. Delivery
We divided our project into three phases (1) Research & Discovery, (2) Design, and (3) Delivery. Each phase ended with specific deliverables, a presentation and client discussion to make decisions and define next steps. The Research phase began with a client analysis followed by user research and an in depth market, trend and context analysis. These activities helped us gain a strong understanding of who we were designing for, how our design could integrate into our client’s ecosystem, and what new business and design opportunities we could leverage. Taking these insights into Design, they ultimately helped us define a framework we could craft and brainstorm solutions around. After multiple sessions of ideation, we ultimately narrowed down and picked a theme together with our client to fully deliver in the last phase of the project.
Research & Discovery
Client Assets & Insights
Need to incorporate elements of the BMW brand experience
Opportunity to integrate existing BMW mobility products into service
DriveNow customer are different from BMW - not focused on traditional car ownership
DriveNow is part of BMWi - A sub-brand for redefining luxury personal mobility for the future context
We began our research with a client analysis to get a clear understanding of their goals and needs, and seek inspiration on brand assets and experiences we could integrate. This involved a detailed brand & business analysis, testing the DriveNow service, visiting the client headquarters in Munich, and attending the Frankfurt Motor Show. Through this activity we discovered a P2P parking service BMW owns called Park-at-my-house we could potentially integrate. We also discovered many of our client’s innovation initiatives through their BMWi sub-brand. We saw DriveNow as being an integral part of this mission.
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Analyzing the market & business
No established "Premium" car sharing brand
Partnerships with local municipalities & businesses critical for success to acquire distribution and parking
Opportunity to enhance car sharing experience beyond getting from point A to B
After gaining a solid foundation of our client’s business and service, we looked at competitors domestically and globally to identify potential opportunities and challenges. This involved performing a SWOT analysis on competitors, reviewing articles and reports about the business and having conversations with people who used the service. Although we discovered premium car sharing was still none existent and that there was opportunity to exploit this space, we also discovered that establishing a car sharing business is extremely complex considering it requires a parking infrastructure.
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Investigating The Local Context
Many transportation options (bike, train, subway, bus)
People primarily get around using a combination of train & bicycle
Downed service and gaps in transportation schedules are frequent pain points
Younger people less interested in vehicle ownerships
Car sharing good for filling transportation gaps & accessing a car when needed
To get an understanding of transportation alternatives, infrastructure and cultural traits, we performed contextual inquiries in differing scenarios and conducted a survey to learn how people got around. In addition to car sharing we discovered many public transit options including intercity rail systems, light rail systems, busses, cars and most commonly bicycles. We found most people engaged in intermodal transportation - typically involving a combination of bicycle and train. Despite the wealth of options we discovered many were inconvenienced by system breakdowns and gaps in scheduling. Many also did not want to own cars. These factors supported how car sharing could fill in transportation gaps and fulfill user needs to acquire a car when needed.
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User Research
Contextmapping to discover user motivations and behaviors around mobility
Co-creation sessions to imagine what premium car sharing could look like
To get insight on how our users get around and their motivations behind car sharing, we performed a contextmapping study and generative session. What we ultimately wanted to find out is how and where car sharing could fit into their transportation journeys, what values they seek in car sharing, and what would define a premium car sharing experience. Synthesizing these insights we identified the following user desires and social contexts around mobility and car sharing to center our design around.
Mobility Desires
- Comfort — seeking physical and emotional comfort during travel
- Flexible — on-demand travel, not forced to follow schedules and limited routes
- Personal — ability to have a personalized/customizable experience
- Value — willing to spend more on a premium service with perceived value advantages
Social Context
- Social media — sharing experiences and communicating with friends on social platforms
- Cost sharing — if using services together wanted an easy way to share the cost
- Ridesharing — using online rideshare platforms to hitch rides and reduce travel cost
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Putting a face & story behind users
Generating user insights from social media
In addition to our user research, we also skimmed the social media-sphere to see who were DriveNow's current customers and what sort of conversations they were having. Based on this we were able to loosely get an idea of what their lifestyles were like, what brands they liked and what sort of jobs and social activities they engaged in. These insights would help us get a feel on what sort of emotional touchpoints and aesthetic communication would connect with them.
DESIGN
Strategy
Translating Insights & Defining Objectives
Taking into account the insights we acquired from our client and customers, we synthesized them into a design decision matrix outlining how we could address their needs and desires throughout various steps and touchpoint in the service. This helped us define potential features we could incorporate and emotional states the user should experience throughout the service journey.
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Ideation
Coming up with many ideas and tying together stories and themes
Over the course of a week our team sketched out a number of service design features and ideas, gradually tying them into stories and themes. We ultimately developed three high level concepts we would later share with our client (1) convenience based, (2) community based, and (3) corporate based. For the final design our client asked us to merge the convenience and community concepts.
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Design Solution
By merging the convenience and community themes our ultimate design solution centered around the following features:
Integrated mobility services — DriveNow not just as a car sharing provider but as a premium mobility service enabler.
Journey focus - intermodal integration and planning
Shared experiences — social integration, ride sharing
Cost sharing — making it easier to split rides and share
Referral incentives — Dropbox-style rewards
Premium brand feel — across touchpoints
The rest of our project would be focused on building out and bringing these concepts to life.
Delivery
FINAL DESIGN
Approach
Communicating our design to the client in a language they could understand
Realizing that our client did not have a design background, our team wanted to communicate our design in a way they would understand and could easily share within their organization. We chose to focus on the following goals to communicate our final design:
• Convey how the design experience feels through scenarios, movies and animation.
• Illustrate the customer journey with brand touchpoint moments
• Refine design concepts to effectively illustrate features and possible production appearance
• Support insights with data and help clients envision how dots are connected and form opportunities to innovate
• Outline the business model opportunities, risks and implementation strategy
• Accessible and shareable information for multiple stakeholders
Service Framework & FLOW
To illustrate how the service works, we broke down the steps a user would go through from joining to finish using the service. Each step was then broken down further to illustrate brand touch points and decision options.
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INTERMODAL JOURNEY PLANNING
To illustrate how intermodal features would work in the service, we produced a video exemplifying a user journey on how a person would use the service. Please click the left screen to watch the video.
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Experience Center
We designed a branded store concept as a place where people can learn about the service and sign up. As a premium service we wanted to make this a physical touch point to convey the premium quality of the brand.
Social Integration
To illustrate the social features of the service we produced a video exemplifying a scenario on how a group of friends and fellow DriveNow members could use the service. In this video we wanted to illustrate incentives for getting other people signed up, and how easily ride costs can be split between passengers.
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PREMIUM SERVICE PERKS
To further strengthen the premium experience, we wanted to integrate the DriveNow program with other premium services around hospitality and transportation. One idea we had was the addition of DriveNow rewards points to use towards various partnered service - like a frequent fliers club. We also wanted to give customers a branded key chain instead of a generic card to give them a sense of ownership and prestige.
DRIVENOW APP
To illustrate how the service could be managed by the customer, we developed a conceptual iPhone app. In the video demonstration we also highlighted how customers could use it to request rides from people already driving. Similar ideas would form a couple years later with Uber.
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PARKING HUBS
To address parking challenges and the intermodal aspect of the service, we proposed the idea of branded parking hubs complete with bicycles and vehicles. We also suggested our client integrate their peer-2-peer parking service - Parkatmyhouse - as another solution to finding parking.
Other Deliverables
In addition to the service flow and video demonstrations of how the service would work, we put together infographics, an implementation plan and reports for the client. As an extra deliverable we made infographics of how we thought DriveNow could work in our native cities.
