Automotive

Improving an Automotive Warranty Experience

Teammates:

UX Field Operations Manager, Global Warranty Manager, Warranty SME, Business Designer, UX Designers (x5)

Role:

Project and Research Lead

Background:

For certain warranty coverages, an OEM requires the dealership to receive additional approval (called Prior Approval) to cover the cost of a specific repair under their warranty plan. The OEM uses Prior Approval as a way to track and control warranty spend. However, this additional approval process is extremely frustrating to dealerships who serve as the medium between the OEM and the vehicle customer. Dealerships complain that Prior Approval slowed them down, created a worse end-customer experience, and in some cases hurt their business.

Central Question:

How might we simplify the Prior Approval process in order to reduce vehicle downtime and enable dealers to improve the end-customer experience?

Outcomes:

  • A directional north-star vision co-created with the design/ research and global warranty team. 

  • Three key initiatives to enable a better dealership and end-customer experience. Each initiative was prototyped, user tested, and iterated upon to ensure the success of the initiative. 

  • Clearly mapped out processes of the current prior approval process and the “journey map of a warranty claim.” Both maps articulated where and how pain-points were caused. 

  • Global warranty team was able to articulate their challenges and ask for leadership support to resolve challenges and enable a better end-customer experience. 

Approach / Process:

Key Initiatives from Research:

Journey Map + Service Blueprint:

 

Off-Road Experience Design Strategy

Role: Design & Project Lead

Teammates: Transportation Designers (x4), UX Designers (x5), UX Researcher, Data Analyst

Situation: An automotive company successfully re-launched their heritage off-road product and they needed a strategic vision to continue to guide their innovation and marketing roadmaps as they expanded their portfolio into EVs.

Task: The challenge was to remain true to the brand’s mission to deliver rugged adventure while also stretching and testing opportunities the brand could offer in the future. The company had to support its original user base, but also wanted to appeal to new customer segments. 

Action: I led the team through market analysis, goal setting, and trend research. Then we conducted ethnographies and immersion studies so we not only understood customer needs - we had lived them ourselves. I developed ideation matrixes and similar frameworks for the designers to brainstorm a plethora of ideas, and prioritization criteria to filter our concepts. From there we built physical, digital and VR prototypes to express our design intent. 

Result: We successfully created and communicated our vision to our business, design and engineering partners; and set the vision for the upcoming production programs.

Work Samples: