This project is an iteration of the Repair project (read about it here add link), where we aimed to extend the service to offer a same-day, on-demand heating repair service.
When your heating breaks you do not want to wait days or weeks for a repair. Hot water and heating are a necessity. At the time there were very few companies offering this service, and the ones that did charged a tremendous amount for it.
The aim was to disrupt the market using BOXT's engineer force and real-time location technology.
This on-demand concept only made it to prototype.
Timeline
Concept to prototype delivery and validation was approx 8 weeks, while working on other projects.
Background
In the Repair project we launched a service that enabled a customer to answer a few question about their broken heating, receive a diagnosis and a fixed-price cost for an engineer to visit their home and attempt to fix their issue,
The on-demand customer experience would only make changes to the journey after a user has entered their postcode, so the core of the repair journey (see here for background) would still be relevant. From the checkout onwards the journey needed complex service design, as there are challenges such as:
Presenting On-demand to a customer based on location & number of engineers available.
What state to leave the customer in whilst their job is being offered out to engineers.
What happens if an engineer doesn’t accept the job within a certain time limit?
What time limit should be set for looking for on-demand jobs?
What communication method do we use? SMS? (this is before we launched a customer app in 2023).
We created a prototype for the Customer persona and Engineers. We user tested both and both performed well, with a few minor usability tweaks. We had determined the business logic and how the internal business users would manage the entire on-demand process, however the project was deemed too complex in terms of technology and business change for us to launch the service at the given time.
This project was paused after a final walkthrough with senior management.
This project featured lots of upfront comparator analysis and research, and lots of service design as we had to design the customer experience, the engineer experience, and the internal admin system user journeys.
Product Canvas
We created a Product Canvas in the early planning stages of our project so that the entire team was aligned on what the customer needs were, the business goals, the competitor landscape, and what the proposed solution was.
Comparator/Competitor research
I split this desk research into 2 parts: in-app/website user journey analysis and the comms strategy that each service uses. I looked into the patterns they used, the language they used, and how they were handling certain scenarios using technology. I mapped out each app’s comms map and detailed how a user may have felt in that moment, so I could determine if there were any pain points that I would need to ensure we were covering off in our comms strategy.
The screenshots below show user journey analysis of comparators from both a customer & Engineer persona point of view. These are intentionally zoomed out to show an example of how I worked.
Design & prototyping
Using one of the user testing personas from our initial repair research, and insights we’d gained from the competitor/comparator analysis, I designed our on-demand user journey, detailing the key steps, any comms the user will receive, and how they felt in this given time. This would enable us to proceed into mocking up designs of the key screens within the flow. This template below was obtained from the Figma community and was a great way of presenting an attractive & useful user journey that stakeholders can easily take in on one page.
Evolution of the checkout design
Users nowadays are very used to patterns within on-demand websites and apps where they select “Pay/Order/confirm” and are presented with a holding state whilst a match is found with a worker, whether that be a taxi driver, or food delivery provider. This meant that the UI patterns we could use were very common, however we had to make this fit with our current technical capabilities, and also make it fit within our current checkout design.
Our checkout used design system components, so to reduce the complexity we tried to stick within the constraints of this to begin with, without compromising the experience for our users. Below is a small sample of how the design & journey evolved over time into a final design that we took forward to user testing.
Customers: User testing
We created a prototype to take forward into user testing with customers. Similar to the user testing I carried out for repair, I recruited users that had a recent repair experience and took them through the happy path, but also 3 edge case scenarios where there weren’t any engineers available, when the repair was cancelled, and when an engineer was late. We carried out the testing using a mobile prototype, as our analytics on the repair journey showed us that mobile had the highest percentage of users.
Myself and another Product Designer paired creating this prototype. We wanted to create animations and transitions to mimic how the end experience would feel. We also added SMS messages in to mimic the comms a user would receive over time.
The user testing went very well, with all participants very complimentary of the on-demand engineer tracking. The main points that came out of the research were that the text messages were too frequent (although in a real life scenario these would be more spaced out that in the prototype), and that they would more information about what happens if the job is cancelled.
The below prototype is not final UI. This was to test the concept, as well as the comms.
The on-demand project would completely change the ways of working of an engineer, so this part of the project needed careful planning to ensure that all the engineer’s requirements would be met. There was a segment of engineers that weren’t interested in this and were happy to just continue doing pre-planned repairs, however on-demand would enable engineers in densely populated areas to make a lot more money, as they would not be limited to 6 jobs per day like the current repair service.
One of the most complicated parts of the project to solve would be the business/technical rules around which engineers get offered jobs, in which locations. Real-time tracking of engineers was a completely new concept to BOXT, so we did not have the technology built for this and we did not have the permissions in place from engineers for it.
Below is an example from our discovery trying to determine the best way to handle sending jobs to engineers based on location. After technical discovery and discussions with engineers and our Operations team we decided that the MVP of this concept would be to use the engineers home address (blue circle) as the determining factor for sending them jobs, rather than use real-time location tracking
Distance (radius) from engineer's current location - red
Distance (radius) from engineer's home - blue
I worked with a Product Manager and Operations team to workshop a set of business rules that would work for on-demand for our engineers, so that this could be translated into our UX designs and JIRA tickets, for the developers to start work on the underlying architecture.
Below is an example of how the business rules diagram translated into user journey and screens design in the Engineer app.
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