THE CHALLENGE
Develop an innovative User Experience for a car-sharing service for the car manufacturer Daimler. The product must integrate into a thriving market strategy.
THE OUTCOME
"Wecon" is a crowd-based close community car-sharing service. The service will be offered by the provider Daimler and will be managed in a decentralized way.
MY ROLE
Research, Ideation, Wireframing, UX Design, Prototyping
Master Thesis - with Selina Mieslinger | Tutors: Prof. Schendzielorz, Prof. Groß | In cooperation with Daimler TSS
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Daimler-TSS.
Wecon
community connection.
RESEARCH
Our research focused on two main Megatrends: Mobility and Smart Mobility, the Sharing Economy and Peer-to-peer Sharing. We believe that at the intersection of these two megatrends, the topic of carsharing can represent an unexplored potential for the mobility of tomorrow.
KEY INSIGHTS
We gained first literature insights and benchmarked all available carsharing systems currently available in Germany and around the world. After that, we interviewed experts from all different stakeholders' areas as well as users and collected opinions on different peer-to-peer platforms among the Daimler employees.
We discovered that people have a strong aversion to sharing the private vehicle with other peers. As cars advance in their technologies, new business models must be created to adapt the product to modern needs and new user segments.
OPPURTINITY AREAS
We developed eight opportunity areas: "Understanding helps trust", "The car at every corner", "Nice to miet you!", "Traditionalists VS Millennials", "Security as a whole package", "Trust the brand", "My car, my business", and "Mobility as a commodity object". Every opportunity area entails different problems and different solutions, but it summarizes the main challenges for this topic.
1 car sharing vehicle can substitute up to 20 private vehicles.
A car is parked 23 hours a day on average.
For this reason, we didn't want to leave any aspect of this complex topic and decided to explore all opportunity areas in a brainstorming session. We developed more than 300 ideas in an afternoon and placed them onto a timeline of three different scenarios, considering that technological advances will come in the future.
We then prioritized the ideas and formed small groups. Each of them flowed into three different business model canvas. We then chose the most reliable strategy.
BRAINSTORMING
THE PRODUCT
The second page is "Time" where every member can book their rental times as well as submit requests to any other member.
The main page is the Feed, which works as a blackboard for all members. They can share invitations, messages as well as requests on this page. When somebody starts the navigation and has the "social mode" activated, the whole community gets notified and is able to track the car live.
The third page allows the user to locate the car, lock and unlock it via fingerprint.
The profile page is located in the lower right corner. Here each member can see their social points balance and has different profile and community settings. Here the user can also activate and deactivate the social mode.
THE CONCEPT
"Wecon" is a crowd-based close community car-sharing service, for short and long distances. The service will be offered by the provider Daimler and will be managed in a decentralized way. With this concept, we achieve a minimal cost of ownership for both parties as well as better organized needs in the community.
Communities will be built around a Giver, which provides the vehicle and manages the rentals. The project overall is based on the concept of "Fractional Ownership".
In this way, the OEM doesn't have fleet management costs and can gain sustainable revenues from a split financing and leasing system. Giver and Getters are, in this way, able to buy the car based on a subscription model.
USE CASES
We then studied four main use cases: the invitational process, the organizational process, the rental, and the expansion of communities, and how they can develop. For each of them we defined all touchpoints between the three main actors.
01 - The invitation can be sent from the giver to the community members and vice versa. The concept is based on friends' communities; however, what happens if the members don't know each other? Our platform provides a matching system according to their personal needs.
02 - The organization is based on a synced calendar. Every member can book rental times. The total time available for each member is proportional to their membership.
03 - In the rental process, the getters will be able to locate and navigate to the car as well as unlock it with their smartphones. The same navigation system is provided onboard.
04 - Getters can be members of different communities; however, two Givers can match their communities and establish one big neighborhood. This process is also based on the same criteria as point 1.
Part of the outlook of our Master Thesis was about exploring new future scenarios and the technological advancement of autonomous cars and new interaction forms. We recorded a short video to explain our theory.
The video is divided into two big main scenes that represent the scenarios we wanted to highlight. The first scenario is taking place in our times, where users are mainly interacting with their smartphone and carrying out all the necessary actions for the community's organization.
The second scenario shows how users will start interacting more with their Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA). We believe that along with Graphic and Tangible User Interfaces, we will see a rise of Zero User Interfaces in the next years. Apps may soon be an outdated concept as we will carry out our commands more generic than ever: imagine saying "Hey, Google! I need to go to the supermarket" vs. "Hey Google! Launch the Uber App". The system will be smart enough to carry out actions and decisions for the users and organize the carsharing rides for them.
We believe that the first step to a successful Carsharing service is also to start with close, small and self-organized communities. The acceptance for this mobility form could then, in this way, grow until we are able in the future, with the advent of autonomous systems, to open this service to an open community. We can even think that the model will grow towards a Mobility built upon Usership (instead of Car Ownership) and, foremost, completely on-demand.
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