Plein Air Club is the motorhome lovers club linked to the lifestyle magazine Plein Air, which gathers the largest community of lovers of outdoors, camper, caravan and travel in Italy.
Plein Air Club needed to have a mobile app to become the go to online resource for all motorhome travellers while on the go.
As a member of the UX team I was responsible for the sketching of the main screens and the users flow design (including user testing).
KEY PROJECT FEATURES
| Type | iOs App |
| Device | Mobile |
| Industry | Travel | Tools | Photoshop, Sketch, InVision, InVision DSM, Slack, Team Viewer |
Context
Having been an editorial venture for over 40 years Plein Air has an extensive content database which has always been the core of their publishing activity. As the company decided to shift from an online magazine type of communication to an interactive app the goal was to make it as easy as possible for users to access all the information and resources needed during their journey through Italy, thus encouraging them to sign up to the club.
Challenges
Given the vastity of the content database and the diversity of users, the main challenge was to make sure it is easy for users to access the content they need while allowing the customer to be able to promote their key offers and promotions.
My role
Apply design thinking approach to find the underlying causes of the problems and decrease the chances of “human error” while allowing users to learn as they go, thus shifting the company’s approach from a training driven one to a more user and learner friendly design. Given the complexity of the tasks, the idea was that without the right interface some tasks became simply impossible to perform because requiring too much knowledge from the user. This was achieved by leveraging the concept of affordances and signifiers, using product constraints to help the user be taught by the product how to use it.
Work
In the discovery phase I performed a deep user research via phone and meetings with users. The process was driven by an extensive use of the”five whys” procedure, this allowed us to avoid focusing just on the obvious errors and discover the hidden ones as well. Then we developed a testing script aimed at tackling simple tasks that had shown issues in the past and started by sketching the prototype of the new version of the related pages. This allowed us to identify some quick wins that were deployed in the full prototype along with a design system which proved much more effective and performant through a clearer taxonomy of elements, disambiguation of symbols, etc.
Results
Using design to prevent errors or lessen their cost resulted in a 37% decrease in time needed to accomplish monitored key tasks and in 53% reduction of phone calls to customer center.
Key takeaways
Using design thinking to identify the root issues of the platform allowed us to improve the usability of the platform thus reducing the costs of using the platform (both psichological and and in terms of time) for users and cutting the costs of support for the customer.
