Overview
USAA offers tremendous discounts for their military members. The most popular being discounts for car rentals around the world. The Car Rental Tool is the third most visited page on usaa.com and brings in over $5 million/year in profits. Although the page ranked high in traffic, after investigating further we discovered of the 1.6 million users who visited the page over the last year, half dropped out almost immediately after visiting.
Role
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Visual UI Design
Interaction Design
Visual UI Design
The Problem
More than half of users visiting the Car Rental Tool drop out. There were a few more problems identified after the discovery phase:
• Users didn't know about the tremendous benefits they receive through USAA and why they should go through USAA to rent their vehicle.
• The tool was only available on desktop and offered no mobile experience.
• The tool was an outdated legacy system and all current marketing strategy was directing traffic to the desktop version of the tool. Because of this, users being driven from social and email on mobile were being directed to a broken page and had no way of getting to our rental partners through mobile.
• Users didn't know about the tremendous benefits they receive through USAA and why they should go through USAA to rent their vehicle.
• The tool was only available on desktop and offered no mobile experience.
• The tool was an outdated legacy system and all current marketing strategy was directing traffic to the desktop version of the tool. Because of this, users being driven from social and email on mobile were being directed to a broken page and had no way of getting to our rental partners through mobile.
The Solution
After interviewing business stakeholders and our customer call center reps we had a good idea of our users pain points with the current experience. In addition to mapping out the current user flow of the Car Rental Tool and all channels leading to it, we also conducted a card sorting study with members to understand what the most important features were to them when renting a car. The solution was to redesign the entire system from a responsive mobile-first approach. Update the information architecture to drive traffic to the USAA car rental landing page to educate users "why" they should rent through USAA, then drive them to the tool for rental rate comparisons.
Information Architecture
Sketches
Wireframes
After wire-framing the user flows we sent them to user testing to validate our assumptions and iterate the designs based on testing.
Visual UI Design
After designing the UI and prototyping the experience we ran it through user testing one more time before launching.
The Impact
A cohesive car rental experience and first ever mobile channel addition. For the first time, members overseas and on the go could make a seamless car rental reservation while taking advantage of member only discounted rates. The strategic shift to drive users to the car rental landing page first to educate them "why" they should use USAA for their car rental choice lead to a natural lift of 18% in desktop and 8% in mobile channels and a significant decrease in drop off rates.
